Waterloo

BY

IR BELLOC

WATERLOO

WATERLOO

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

LONDON

STEPHEN SWIFT AND CO, LTD.

16 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN

WEST CENTRAL

MCMXII

CONTENTS

I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND
EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO
CAMPAIGN .... 9

II. THE PRELIMINARIES I NAPOLEON'S

ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE 24

III. THE DECISIVE DAY : FRIDAY, THE
16TH OF JUNE —

LIGNY .... 63
QTJATRE-BRAS . . .84

IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH
ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO
AND WAVRE . . . .129

V. THE ACTION 158

WATERLOO

i

THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND
EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO
CAMPAIGN

IT must continually be insisted upon in
military history, that general actions, how-
ever decisive, are but the functions of cam-
paigns; and that campaigns, in their turn,
are but the functions of the political energies
of the governments whose armies are
engaged.

The object of a campaign is invariably
a political object, and all its military effort
is, or should be, subsidiary to that political
object.

One human community desires to impose
upon the future a political condition which
another human community rejects ; or each
is attempting to impose upon the future,
conditions irreconcilable one with the other.

10 WATERLOO

Until we know what those conditions are,
or what is the political objective of each
opponent, we cannot decide upon the success
of a campaign, nor give it its true position
in history.

Thus, to take the simplest and crudest
case, a nation or its government determines
to annex the territory of a neighbour ; that
is, to subject a neighbouring community to
the laws of the conqueror. That neighbour-
ing community and its government, if they
are so old-fashioned as to prefer freedom,
will resist by force of arms, and there will
follow what is called a " campaign " (a
term derived from the French, and signify-
ing a countryside : for countrysides are the
theatres of wars). In this campaign the
political object of the attempted conquest
on the one hand, and of resistance to it on
the other, are the issue. The military
aspect of the campaign is subsidiary to its
political objects, and we judge of its success
or failure not in military but in political
terms.

The prime military object of a general
is to " annihilate " the armed force of his
opponents. He may do this by breaking
up their organisation and dispersing them,
or by compelling the surrender of their
arms. He may achieve success in this

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 11

purely military object in any degree. But
if, as an end and consequence of his military
success, the political object be not achieved —
if, for instance, in the particular case we are
considering, the neighbouring community
does not in the future obey laws dictated
to it by the conqueror, but remains autono-
mous— then the campaign has failed.

Such considerations are, I repeat, the
very foundation of military history ; and
throughout this Series they will be insisted
upon as the light in which alone military
history can be understood.

It is further true that not only may a
campaign be successful in the military sense,
and yet in the largest historical sense be a
failure, but, quite evidently, the actions
in a campaign may each be successful and
yet the campaign a failure ; or each action
may, on the whole, fail, and yet that cam-
paign be a success. As the old formulse
go, " You can win every battle and lose
your campaign." And, again, " A great
general does not aim at winning battles,
but at winning his campaign." An action
results from the contact of the opposing
forces, and from the necessity in which they
find themselves, after such contact, of
attempting the one to disorganise or to
capture the other. And in the greater part

12 WATERLOO

actions are only " accepted," as the phrase
goes, by either party, because each party
regards the action as presenting opportuni-
ties for his own success.

A campaign can perfectly well be con-
ceived in which an opponent, consciously
inferior in the field, will avoid action
throughout, and by such a plan can actually
win the campaign in the end. Historical
instances of this, though rare, exist. And
there have even been campaigns where,
after a great action disastrous to one side,
that side has yet been able to keep up a
broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and
exhausting to baulk the conqueror of his
political object in the end.

In a word, it is the business^of the
serious student in military history to
reverse the popular and dramatic con-
ception of war, to neglect the brilliance
and local interest of a battle for the
larger view of the whole operations ;
and, again, to remember that these opera-
tions are not an end in themselves, but
are only designed to serve the political
plan of the government which has com-
manded them.

Judged in this true light, we may establish

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 13

the following conclusions with regard to the
battle of Waterloo.

First, the battle of Waterloo was a de-
cisive action, the result of which was a
complete military success for the A1 -es in
the campaign they had undertaken, and
a complete military defeat for Napoleon,
who had opposed them.

This complete military success of the
Allies' campaign was, again, equivalent to
a success in their immediate political object,
which was the overthrow of Napoleon's
personal power, the re-establishment of
the Bourbons upon the French throne, and
the restoration of those traditions and
ideals of government which had been
common to Europe before the outbreak of
the French Revolution twenty-four years
before.

Had the effect of this battle and that
campaign been permanent, one could speak
of their success as complete ; but when we
discuss that largest issue of all, to wit,
whether the short campaign which Water-
loo so decisively concluded really effected
its object, considering that that object was
the permanent destruction of the revolu-
tionary effort and the permanent re-
establishment of the old state of affairs in
Europe, we are compelled to arrive at a

14 WATERLOO

very different conclusion : a conclusion
which will vary with the varying judgment
of men, and one which cannot be final,
because the drama is not yet played out ;
but a conclusion which, in the eyes of all,
singularly modifies the effect of the cam-
paign of Waterloo.

It is obvious, at the first glance we take
of European history during, say, the life-
time of a man who should have been a boy
in Waterloo year, that the general political
object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic
armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It
was ultimately established. The war had
been successfully maintained during too
long a period for the uprooting of the
political conditions which the French had
attempted to impose upon Europe. Again,
those conditions were sufficiently sympa-
thetic to the European mind at the time
to develop generously, and to grow in spite
of all attempted restriction. And we dis-
cover, as a fact, democratic institutions,
democratic machinery at least, spreading
rapidly again after their defeat at Waterloo,
and partially victorious, first in France and
later elsewhere, within a very few years of
that action.

The same is true of certain secondary
results of the prolonged revolutionary and

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 15

Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality pre-
dominated over the old idea of a monarch
governing his various "peoples," and the
whole history of the nineteenth century was
a gradual vindication of the principle of
nationality. A similar fate awaited institu-
tions bound up with the French revolu-
tionary effort : a wide and continually
expressed suffrage, the arming of whole
nations in defence of their independence,
the ordering of political life upon the new
plan, down even to the details of the
revolutionary weights and measures (the
metre, the gramme, etc.) — these succeeded
and in effect triumphed over the arrange-
ments which that older society had fought
to restore.

On the other hand, the advance of all
this was much slower, much more disturbed,
much less complete, than it would have
been had Napoleon not failed in Russia,
suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and
fallen for ever upon that famous field of
Waterloo ; and one particular characteristic,
namely, the imposition of all these things
upon Europe by the will of a government
at Paris, wholly disappeared.

We may sum up, then, and say that the
political effect of the battle of Waterloo
and its campaign was an immediate success

16 WATERLOO

for the Allies : that their ultimate success
the history of the nineteenth century has
reversed ; but that the victory of Waterloo
modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted
in a permanent fashion the establishment
of those conceptions of society and govern-
ment which the Revolution, and Napoleon
as its soldier, had set out to establish.

There is a side question attached to all
this, with which I shall conclude, because
it forms the best introduction to what
is to follow : that question is, — " Would
Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even
if he had triumphed instead of fallen upon
the 18th of June 1815 ?" In other words,
was Waterloo one of these battles the
winning or losing of which by either side,
meant a corresponding decisive result to
that side? Had Wellington's command
broken at Waterloo before the arrival of
Blucher, would Napoleon's consequent vic-
tory have meant as much to him as his
defeat actually meant to the allies ?

The answer of history to this question is,
No. Even had Napoleon won on that day
he would have lost in the long run.

The date to which we must affix the
reverse of Napoleon's effort is not the

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT

18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October
1812, when the Grand Army began its
retreat from Moscow ; and the political
decision, his failure in which was the
origin of his fall, was not the decision
taken in June 1815 to advance against
the Allies in Belgium, but the decision
taken in May 1812 to advance into the
vast spaces of Russia. The decisive
action which the largest view of his-
tory will record in centuries to come as
the defeat which ruined Napoleon took
place, not south of Brussels, but near the
town of Leipzig, two years before. From
the last moment of that three days' battle
(again the 19th of October, precisely a
twelvemonth after the retreat from
Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the
French armies are continually falling back.
Upon the 4th of April in the following year
Napoleon abdicated ; and exactly a month
later, on the 4th of May, he was imprisoned,
under the show of local sovereignty, in the
island of Elba.

It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that,
having escaped from that island, he landed
upon the southern coast of France. There
followed the doomed attempt to save some-
what of the Revolution and the Napoleonic
scheme, which is known to history as the

2

18 WATERLOO

" hundred days." Even that attempt
would have been impossible had not the
greater part of the commanders of units
in the French army, that is, of the colonels
of regiments, abandoned the Bourbon
government, which had been restored at
Paris, and decided to support Napoleon.

But even so, the experiment was hazardous
in the extreme. Had the surrounding
governments which had witnessed and
triumphed over his fall permitted him, as
he desired, to govern France in peace, and
France alone, this small part of the revolu-
tionary plan might have been saved from
the general wreck of its fortunes and of his.
But such an hypothesis is fantastic. There
could be and there was no chance that
these great governments, now fully armed,
and with all their organised hosts prepared
and filled with the memory of recent victory,
would permit the restoration of democratic
government in that France which had been
the centre and outset of the vast movement
they had determined to destroy. Further,
though Napoleon had behind him the
majority, he had not the united mass of
the French people. An ordered peace
following upon victory would have given
him such a support ; after his recent
crushing defeat it was lacking. It was

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 19

especially true that the great chiefs of the
army were doubtful. His own generals
rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more
with doubt, while a few betrayed him
early in the process of his attempted
restoration.

It is impossible to believe that under
such circumstances Napoleon could have
successfully met Europe in arms. The
military resources of the French prople,
though not exhausted, were reaching their
term. New levies of men yielded a material
far inferior to the conscripts of earlier
years ; and when the Emperor estimated
800,000 men as the force which he required
for his effort, it was but the calculation of
despair. Eight hundred thousand men :
even had they been the harvest of a long
peace, the whole armed nation, vigorous
in health and fresh for a prolonged contest,
would not have been sufficient. The com-
bined Powers had actually under arms a
number as great as that, and inexhaustible
reserves upon which to draw. A quarter
of a million stood ready in the Netherlands,
another quarter of a million could march
from Austria to cross the Rhine. North
Italy had actually present against him
70,000 men ; and Russia, which had a
similarly active and ready force of 170,000,

20 WATERLOO

could increase that host almost indefinitely
from her enormous body of population.

But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon
found to hiscommandnot one quarter of that
number armed and ready for war. Though
Napoleon fell back upon that desperate
resource of a starved army, the inclusion
of militia ; though he swept into his net the
whole youth of that year, and accepted
conscripts almost without regard to physical
capacity ; though he went so far as to put
the sailors upon shore to help him in his
effort, and counted in his effectives the
police, the customs officials, and, as one may
say, every uniformed man, he was compelled,
even after two and a half months of effort,
to consider his ready force as less than
300,000, indeed only just over 290,000.

There was behind this, it is true, a reserve
of irregulars such as I have described, but
the spirit furnishing those irregulars was
uncertain, and the yield of them patchy and
heterogeneous. Perhaps a quarter of the
country responded readily to the appeal
which was to call up a national militia.
But even upon the eve of the Waterloo
campaign there were departments, such as
the Orne, which had not compelled five
per cent, of those called to join the colours,
such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers,

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 21

which had not furnished eight per cent.,
and at the very last moment, of every
twenty-five men called, not fifteen had
come.

Add to this that Napoleon must strike
at once or not at all, and it will readily be
seen how desperate his situation was.
His great chiefs of the higher command
were not united in his service, the issue was
doubtful, and to join Napoleon was to be a
rebel should he fail, — was to be a rebel, that
is, in case of a very probable event. The
marvel is that so many of the leading men
who had anything to lose undertook the
chances at all. Finally, even of the total
force available to him at that early moment
when he was compelled to strike, Napoleon
could strike with but a fraction. Less than
half of the men available could he gather
to deliver this decisive blow ; and that blow,
be it remembered, he could deliver at but
one of the various hosts which were pre-
paring to advance against him.

He was thus handicapped by two things :
first, the necessity under which he believed
himself to be of leaving considerable numbers
to watch the frontiers. Secondly, and most
important, the limitations imposed upon
him by his lack of provision. With every
effort, he could not fully arm and equip and

22 WATERLOO

munition a larger force than that which
he gathered in early June for his last
desperate throw; and the body upon the
immediate and decisive success of which
everything depended numbered but 124,000
men.

With this force Napoleon proceeded to
attack the Allies in the Netherlands. There
was a belt of French-speaking population.
There was that body of the Allies which lay
nearest to his hand, and over which, if he
were but victorious, his victory would have
its fullest effect. There were the troops
under Wellington, a defeat of which would
mean the cutting off of England, the
financier of the Allies, from the Continent.
There was present a population many
elements of which sympathised with him
and with the French revolutionary effort.
Finally, the allied force in Belgium was the
least homogeneous of the forces with which
he would have to deal in the long succession
of struggle from which even a success at this
moment would not spare him.

From all these causes combined, and for
the further reason that Paris was most
immediately threatened from this neigh-
bouring Belgian frontier, it was upon that
frontier that Napoleon determined to cast
his spear. It was upon the 5th of June

POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT 23

that the first order was sent out for the
concentration of this army for the invasion
of Belgium.

In ten days the 124,000 men, with their
370 guns, were massed upon the line between
Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately
upon the frontier, and ready to cross it.
The way in which the frontier was passed
and the river Sambre crossed before the
first actions took place form between them
the preliminaries of the campaign, and must
be the subject of my next section.

II

THE PRELIMINARIES : NAPO-
LEON'S ADVANCE ACROSS
THE SAMBRE

To understand the battle of Waterloo it is
necessary, more perhaps than in the case
of any other great decisive action, to read
it strategically : that is, to regard the final
struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only
the climax of certain general movements,
the first phase of which was the concentra-
tion of the French Army of the North, and
the second the passage of the Sambre river
and the attack. This second phase covered
four days in time, and in space an advance
of nearly forty miles.

There is a sense, of course, in which it is
true of every battle that its result is closely
connected with the strategy which led up
to its tactical features : how the opposing
forces arrived upon the field, in what
condition, and in what disposition and at
what time, with what advantage or dis-

24

THE PRELIMINARIES 25

advantage, is always necessarily connected
with the history of the campaign rather
than of the individual action ; but, as we
saw in the case of Blenheim, and as might
be exemplified from a hundred other cases,
the greater part of battles can be under-
stood by following the tactical dispositions
upon the field. They are won or lost, in
the main, according to those dispositions.

With Waterloo it was not so. Waterloo
was lost by Napoleon, won by the Allies, not
mainly on account of tactical movements
upon the field itself, but mainly on account
of what had happened in the course of the
advance of the French army to that field.
In other words, the military character of
that great decisive action is always missed
by those who have read it isolated from the
movements immediately preceding it.

Napoleon, determining to strike at Bel-
gium under the political circumstances
we have already seen, was attacking forces
about double his own.

He was like one man coming up rapidly
and almost unexpectedly to attack two : but
hoping if possible to deal successively and
singly with either opponent.

His doubtful chance of success in such
a hazard obviously lay in his being able to
attack each enemy separately : that is, to

26 WATERLOO

engage first one before the second came
to his aid ; then the second ; and thus to
defeat each in turn. The chance of victory
under such circumstances is slight. It pre-
supposes the surprise of the two allied
adversaries by their single opponent, and
the defeat of one so quickly that the other
cannot come to his aid till all is over. But
no other avenue of victory is open to a man
fighting enemies of double his numerical
strength ; at least under conditions where
armament, material, and racial type are
much the same upon either side.

The possibility of dealing thus with his
enemy Napoleon thought possible, and
thought it possible from two factors in the
situation before him.

The first factor was that the allied army,
seeing its great numbers, the comparatively
small accumulation of supplies which it
could yet command, the great length of
frontier which it had to watch, was spread
out in a great number of cantonments, the
whole stretch of which was no less than one
hundred miles in length, from Liege upon the
east or left to Tournay upon the west or right.

The second factor which gave Napoleon
his chance was that this long line depended
for its supply, its orders, its line of retreat
upon two separate and opposite bases!

THE PRELIMINARIES 27

The left or eastern half, formed mainly
of Prussian subjects, and acting under
BLUCHER, had arrived from the east,
looked for safety in case of defeat to a
retreat towards the Rhine, obtained its
supplies from that direction, and in general
was fed from the east along those communi-
cations, continual activity along which are
as necessary to the life of an army as the
uninterrupted working of the air-tube is
necessary to the life of a diver.

The western or right-hand part of the
line, Dutch, German, Belgian, and British,
acting under WELLINGTON, depended, upon
the contrary, upon the North Sea, and
upon communication across that sea with
England. That is, it drew its supplies and
the necessaries of its existence from the
west, the opposite and contrary direction
from that to which the Prussian half of the
Allies were looking for theirs. The effect
of this upon the campaign is at once simple
to perceive and of capital importance in
Napoleon's plan.

Wellington and Blucher did not, under
the circumstances, oppose to Napoleon a
single body drawing its life from one stream
of communications. They did not in com-
bination command a force defending one
goal ; they commanded two forces defend^

28 WATERLOO

ing two goals. The thorough defeat of one
would throw it back away from the other
if the attack were delivered at the point
where the two just joined hands ; and the
English1 or western half under Wellington
was bound to movements actually contrary
to the Prussian or eastern half under
Blucher in case either were defeated before
the other could come to its aid.

Napoleon, then, in his rapid advance upon
Belgium, was a man conducting a column
against a line. He was conducting that
column against one special point, the point
of junction between two disparate halves
of an opposing line. He advanced there-
fore upon a narrow front perpendicular to,
and aimed at the centre of, the long scattered
cordon of his double enemy, which cordon
it was his business if possible to divide just
where the western end of one half touched
the eastern end of the other. He designed
to fight in detail the first portion he could
engage, then to turn upon the other, and
thus to defeat both singly and in turn.

1 I use the word "English" here to emphasise the
character of Wellington's command; for though even
this second half of the allied line was not in its
majority of British origin, yet it contained a large
proportion of British troops ; the commander was an
Englishman, the Duke of Wellington, and the best
elements in the force were from these islands.

THE PRELIMINARIES 29

I will put this strategical position before
the reader in the shape of an English
parallel in order to make it the plainer,
and I will then, by the aid of sketch maps,
show how the Allies actually lay upon the
Belgian frontier at the moment when
Napoleon delivered his attack upon it.

Imagine near a quarter million of men
spread out in a line of separate cantonments
from Windsor at one extremity to Bristol
at the other ; and suppose that the eastern
half of this line from Windsor to as far west
as Wallingford is depending for its supplies
and its communications upon the river
Thames and its road system, and is prepared
in case of defeat to fall back, down the valley
of that stream towards London.

On the other hand, imagine that the
western half from Swindon to Bristol is
receiving its supplies from the Severn and
the Bristol Channel, and must in case of
defeat fall back westward upon that line.

Now, suppose an invading column rather
more than 120,000 strong to be advanc-
ing from the south against this line, but
prepared to strike up from almost any
point on the Channel. It strikes, as a
fact, from Southampton, and marches
rapidly north by Winchester and Newbury.
By the time it has reached Newbury, the

30 WATERLOO

eastern half of the opposing line, that
between Wallingford and Windsor, has
concentrated to meet it, but is defeated
in the neighbourhood of that town.

Such a battle at Newbury would corre-
spond to the battle at Ligny (let it be
fought upon a Friday). Meanwhile, the
western half, hurrying up in aid, has failed
to effect a junction before the eastern half
was defeated, comes up too late above
Newbury, and finding it is too late, retires
upon Abingdon. The victorious invader
pursues them, and at noon on the second
day engages them in a long line which
they hold in front of Abingdon.

If he has only to deal in front of Abingdon
with this second or western half, which
hurried up too late to help the defeated
eastern half, he has very fair chances of
success. He is slightly superior numeri-
cally ; he has, upon the whole, better troops
and he has more guns. But the eastern
half of the defending army, which has been
beaten at Newbury, though beaten, was
neither destroyed nor dispersed, nor thrust
very far back from the line of operations.
It has retreated to Wallingford, that is
towards the north, parallel to the retreat
of the western half; and a few hours
after this western half is engaged in battle

THE PRELIMINARIES 31

with the invader in front of Abingdon, the
eastern half appears upon that invader's
right flank, joins forces with the line of
the defenders at Abingdon, and thus brings
not only a crushing superiority of numbers
upon the field against the invader, but also
brings it up in such a manner that he is
compelled to fight upon two fronts at once.
He is, of course, destroyed by such a com-
bination, and his army routed and dis-
persed. An action of this sort fought at
Abingdon would correspond to the action
which was fought upon the field of Water-
loo, supposing, of course, for the purpose
of this rough parallel, an open countryside
without the obstacle of the river.

The actual positions of the two combined
commands, the command of Blucher and
the command of Wellington, which between
them held the long line between Tournay
and Liege, will be grasped from the sketch
map upon the next page.

The reader who would grasp the cam-
paign in the short compass of such an essay
as this had best consider the numbers and
the positions in a form not too detailed,
and busy himself with a picture which,
though accurate, shall be general.

Let him, then, consider the whole line
between Liege and Tournay to consist of

THE PRELIMINARIES 33

the two halves already presented : a
western half, which we will call the Duke
of Wellington's, and an eastern half, which
we will call Blucher's : of these two the
Duke of Wellington was Commander-in-
chief.

Next, note the numbers of each and
their disposition. The mixed force under
the Duke of Wellington was somewhat
over 100,000 men, with just over 200 guns.1
They consisted in two corps and a reserve.
The first corps was under the Prince of
Orange, and was mainly composed of men
from the Netherlands. Its headquarters
were at Braine le Comte. The second corps
was under Lord Hill, and contained the
mass of the British troops present. Its
headquarters were at Ath. These two
between them amounted to about half of
Wellington's command, and we find them
scattered in cantonments at Oudenarde, at
Ath, at Enghien, at Soignies, at Nivelles,
at Roeulx, at Braine le Comte, at Hal. A
reserve corps under the Duke's own com-
mand was stationed at Brussels, and
amounted to more than one-fifth, but less
than one- quarter, of the whole force. The
remaining quarter and a little more is
accounted for by scattered cavalry (mainly
1 Rather more than 106,000 ; guns 204.

3

34 WATERLOO

in posts upon the river Dender), by the
learned arms, gunners and sappers, dis-
tributed throughout the army, and by
troops which were occupying garrisons —
in numbers amounting to rather more than
ten per cent, of the force.

The eastern Prussian or left half of the
line was, as is apparent in the preceding
map, somewhat larger. It had a quarter
more men and half as many guns again
as that under the Duke of Wellington, and
it was organised into four army corps,
whose headquarters were respectively Char-
leroi, Namur, Ciney, and Liege.

The whole line, therefore, which was
waiting the advance of Napoleon, was not
quite two and a third hundred thousand
men, with rather more than 500 guns.
Of this grand total of the two halves,
Wellington's and Blucher's combined, about
eighteen per cent, came from the British
Islands, and of that eighteen per cent.,
again, a very large proportion — exactly
how large it is impossible to determine —
were Irish.

Now let us turn to the army which
Napoleon was leading against this line of
Wellington and Blucher. It was just under
one hundred and a quarter thousand men
strong, that is, just over half the total

THE PRELIMINARIES 35

number of its opponents. It had, however,
a heavier proportion of guns, which were
two-thirds as numerous as those it had to
meet.

This " Army of the North " was organ-
ised in seven great bodies, unequal in size,
but each a unit averaging seventeen odd
thousand men. These seven great bodies
were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Army Corps,
the 6th Army Corps, the Imperial Guard,
and the reserve cavalry under Grouchy.

The concentration of this army began,
as I said in a previous section, upon the
5th of June, and was effected with a
rapidity and order which are rightly re-
garded as a model by all writers upon
military science.

The French troops, when the order for
concentration was given, stretched west-
ward as far as Lille, eastward as far as
Metz, southward as far as Paris, in the
neighbourhood of which town was the
Imperial Guard. The actual marching of
the various units occupied a week. Napoleon
was at the front on the night of the 13th of
June ; the whole army was upon the 14th
drawn up upon a line stretched from
Maubeuge to Philippeville, and the attack
was ready to begin.

The concentration had been effected

36 WATERLOO

with singular secrecy, as well as with the
promptitude and accuracy we have noted ;
and though the common opinion of Welling-
ton and Blucher, that Napoleon had no
intention of attacking, reposed upon sound
general judgment — for the hazard Napoleon
was playing in this game of one against
two was extreme, — nevertheless it is re-
markable that both of these great com-
manders should have been so singularly
ignorant of the impending blow. Napoleon
himself was actually over the frontier at
the moment when Wellington was writing
at his ease that he intended to take the
offensive at the end of the month, and
Blucher, a few days earlier, had expressed
the opinion that he might be kept inactive
for a whole year, since Bonaparte had no
intention of attacking.

By the evening of Wednesday, June the
14th, all was ready for the advance, which
was ordered for the next morning.

It would but confuse the general reader
to attempt to carry with him through this
short account the name and character of
each commander, but it is essential to
remember one at least — the name of Erlon ;
and he should also remember that the corps
which Erlon commanded was the First
Corps ; for, as we shall see, upon Erlon's

THE PRELIMINARIES 37

wanderings with this First Corps depended
the unsatisfactory termination of Ligny,
and the subsequent intervention of the
Prussians at Waterloo, which decided that
action.

It is also of little moment for the purpose
of this to retain the names of the places
which were the headquarters of each of
these corps before the advance began. It
is alone important to the reader that he
should have a clear picture of the order in
which this advance took place, for thus
only will he understand both where it
struck, and why, with all its rapidity, it
suffered from certain shocks or jerks.

Napoleon's advance was upon three
parallel lines and in three main bodies.

The left or westernmost consisted of
the First and Second Corps d'Armee; the
centre, of the Imperial Guard, together
with the Third ' and Sixth Corps. The
third or right consisted of the Fourth
Corps alone, with a division of cavalry.
These three bodies, when the night of
Wednesday the 14th of June fell, lay,
the first at Sorle and Leer ; the second at
Beaumont, and upon the road that runs
through it to Charleroi ; the third at
Philippeville.

It is at this stage advisable to consider

38 WATERLOO

why Napoleon had chosen the crossing of
the Sambre at Charleroi and the sites
immediately to the north on the left bank
of that river as the point where he would
strike at the long line of the Allies.

Many considerations converged to impose
this line of advance upon Napoleon. In
the first place, it was his task to cut the
line of the Allies in two at the point where
the extremity of one army, the Prussian,
touched upon the extremity of the other,
that of the Duke of Wellington. This
point lay due north of the river-crossing
he had chosen.

Again, the main road to Brussels was
barred by the fortress of Mons, which,
though not formidable, had been put in
some sort of state of defence.

Again, as a glance at the accompanying
map will show, the Prussian half of the allied
line was drawn somewhat in front of the
other half ; and if Napoleon were to attack
the enemy in detail, he must strike at the
Prussians first. Finally, the line Maubeuge-
Philippeville, upon which he concentrated his
front, was, upon the whole, the most central
position in the long line of his frontier
troops, which stretched from Metz to the
neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover.
Being the most central point, not only with

•-•M
11

40 WATERLOO

regard to these two extremities, but also
with regard to distant Paris, it was the
point upon which his concentration could
most rapidly be effected.

This, then, was the position upon the
night of the 14th. The three great bodies
of French troops (much the largest of which
was that in the centre) to march at dawn,
the light cavalry moving as early as half
past two, ahead of the centre, the whole
body of which was to march on Charleroi.

The left, that is the First and Second
Corps, to cross the Sambre at Thuin, the
Abbaye d'Aulne, and Marchiennes. (There
were bridges at all three places.) The right
or Fourth Corps was also to march on
Charleroi.1

Napoleon intended to be over the river
with all his men by the afternoon of the
15th, but, as we shall see, this "bunching "
of fully half the advance upon one crossing
place caused, not a fatal, but a prejudicial
delay. Among other elements in this false
calculation was an apparent error on the

1 Surely an error in judgment, for thus the whole mass
of the army, all of it except the First and Second Corps,
would be crossing the Sambre at that one place, with
all the delay such a plan would involve. As a fact, the
Fourth Corps, or right wing of the advance, was at last
sent over the river by Chatelet, but it would have been
better to have given such orders at the beginning.

42 WATERLOO

part of Soult, who blundered in some way
which kept the Third Corps with the centre
instead of relieving the pressure by sending
it over with the Fourth to cross, under the
revised instructions, by Chatelet.

At dawn, then, the whole front of the
French army was moving. It was the
dawn of Thursday the 15th of June. By
sunset of Sunday all was to be decided.

At this point it is essential to grasp the
general scheme of the operations which
are about to follow.

Put in its simplest elements and graphic-
ally, the whole business began in some
such form as is presented in the accompany-
ing sketch map.

Napoleon's advancing army X Y Z,
marching on Thursday, June 15th, strikes
at 0 (which is Charleroi), the centre of the

:

THE PRELIMINARIES 43

hundred - mile - long line of cantonments
B C - - D E F, which form the two
armies of the Allies, twice as numerous as
his own, but thus dispersed. Just behind
Charier oi (0) are a hamlet and a village, called
respectively Quatre Bras (Q) and Ligny (P).
Napoleon succeeds in bringing the eastern

Real Line of
Prussian Retreat

Napoleon's 'false
idea of same

or Prussian half of this long line D E F to
battle and defeating it at Ligny (P) upon
the next day, Friday, June 16th, before the
western half, or Wellington's ABC, can come
up in aid ; and on the same day a portion of
his forces, X, under his lieutenant, Marshal
Ney, holds up that western half, just as it is
attempting to effect its junction with the
eastern half at Quatre Bras (Q), a few miles
off from Ligny (P). The situation on the
night of Friday, June 16th, at the end of
this second step, is that represented in this
second sketch map.

44 WATERLOO

Believing the Prussians (D E F) to be
retreating from Ligny towards their base
eastward, and not northwards, Napoleon
more or less neglects them and concentrates
his main body in order to follow up Welling-
ton's western half (ABC), and in the hope
of defeating that in its turn, as he has al-
ready defeated the eastern or Prussian
half (D E F) at Ligny (P). With this
object Napoleon advances northward dur-
ing all the third day, Saturday, June 17th.
A 6 c Wellington (A B C)

1 ^w1 ^m ~ retreats north

/: / « j ^Z '<r before him during

/ \J I : j ^ \ that same day, and

A. /; ; / } : then, on the mor-

/ . \/ \ / / ; ; row, the 18th,

«te> fffa •'"'• ; ;,. .-' /. / Sunday, turns to

i^> l$&te/ •' give battle at

;fu? Ifa9^* Waterloo (W).

Napoleon engages

him with fair chances of success, and
the situation as the battle begins at
midday on the 18th is that sketched in
this third map.

But unexpectedly, and against what Napo-
leon had imagined possible, the Prussians
(D E F), when defeated at Ligny (P), did
not retreat upon their base, and have
not so suffered from their defeat as to

THE PRELIMINARIES 45

be incapable of further action. They have
marched northward parallel to the retreat
of Wellington; and while Napoleon (X Y Z)
is at the hottest of his struggle with
Wellington (A B C) at Waterloo (W),
this eastern or Prussian half (D E F)
comes down upon
his flank at (R) in ••» A™ — ^- "-.

the middle of the c=> n c= n

-, , , * Y * R|»-

atternoon, and by •-.,

the combined 1^"^ •

numbers and dis-
position of this
double attack
Napoleon's army * ,p

is crushed before
darkness sets in.

Such, in its
briefest graphic
elements, is the story of the four days.

It will be observed from what we have
said that the whole thing turns upon the
incompleteness of Napoleon's success at
Ligny, and the power of retreating northward
left to the Prussians after that defeat.

When we come to study the details of
the story, we shall see that this, the Prussian
defeat at Ligny, was thus incomplete because
one of Napoleon's subordinates, Erlon, with
the First French Army Corps, received con-

46 WATERLOO

tradictory orders and did not come up as he
should have done to turn the battle of Ligny
into a decisive victory for Napoleon. A
part of Napoleon's forces being thus neutral-
ised and held useless during the fight at
Ligny, the Prussian army escaped, still
formed as a fighting force, and still capable
of reappearing, as it did reappear, at the
critical moment, two days later, upon the
field of Waterloo.

THE ADVANCE

The rapidity of Napoleon's stroke was
marred at its very outset by certain mis-
fortunes as well as certain miscalculations.
His left, which was composed of the First
and Second Corps d'Armee, did indeed
reach the river Sambre in the morning,
and had carried the bridge of Marchiennes
by noon, but the First Corps, under Erlon,
were not across — that is, the whole left had
not negotiated the river — until nearly five
o'clock in the afternoon.

Next, the general in command of the
leading division of the right-hand body —
the Fourth Corps — gave the first example
of that of which the whole Napoleonic
organisation was then in such terror, I
mean the mistrust in the fortunes of the

THE PRELIMINARIES 47

Emperor, and the tendency to revert to
the old social conditions, which for a
moment the Bourbons had brought back,
and which so soon they might bring back
again — he deserted. The order was there-
upon given for the Fourth Corps or right
wing to cross at Chatelet, but it came late
(as late as half -past three in the afternoon),
and did but cause delay. At this eastern
end of Napoleon's front the last men were
not over the river until the next day.

As to the centre (the main body of the
army) , its cavalry reached Charleroi before
ten o'clock in the morning, but an un-
fortunate and exasperating accident be-
fallen a messenger left the infantry im-
mediately behind without instructions. The
cavalry were impotent to force the bridge
crossing the river Sambre, which runs
through the town, until the main body
should appear, and it was not until past
noon that the main body began crossing
the Sambre by the Charleroi bridge. The
Emperor had probably intended to fight
immediately after having crossed the river.
Gosselies, to the north, was strongly held ;
and had all his men been over the Sambre
in the early afternoon as he had intended,
an action fought suddenly, by surprise as
it were, against the advance bodies of the

48 WATERLOO

First Prussian Corps, would have given
the first example of that destruction of
the enemy in detail which Napoleon in-
tended. But the delays in the advance,
rapid as it had been, now forbade any
such good fortune. The end of the day-
light was spent in pushing back the head
of the First Prussian Corps (with a loss of
somewhat over 1000 men), and when night
fell upon that Thursday evening, the 15th
of June, the French held Charleroi and all
the crossings of the Sambre, but were not
yet in a position to attack in force. Of the
left, the First Corps were but just over the
Sambre ; on the right, that is, of the Fourth
Corps, some units were still upon the other
side of the river ; while, of the centre, the
whole of the Sixth Corps, and a certain
proportion of cavalry as well, had still to
cross !

Napoleon had failed to bring the enemy
to action ; that enemy had fallen back upon
Fleurus, pretty nearly intact.1 All the real
work had evidently to be put off, not only
until the morrow, but until a fairly late
hour upon the morrow, for it would take
some time to get all the French forces on
to the Belgian side of the river.

When this should have been accomplished,
1 There were some five hundred Prussian prisoners.

THE PRELIMINARIES 49

however, the task of the next day, the
Friday, was clear.

It was Napoleon's business to fall upon
whatever Prussian force might be con-
centrated before him and upon his right
and to destroy it, meanwhile holding back,
by a force sent up the Brussels road to
Quartre Bras, any attempt Wellington and
his western army might make to join the
Prussians and save them.

That night the Duke of Wellington's
army lay in its cantonments without con-
centration and without alarm, guessing
nothing. The head of Wellington's First
Corps, the young Prince of Orange, who
commanded the Netherlanders, had left
his headquarters to go and dine with the
Duke in Brussels.

Wellington, we may believe if we choose
(the point is by no means certain), knew
as early as three o'clock in the afternoon
that the French had moved. It may have
been as late as five, it may even have been
six. But whatever the hour in which he
received his information, it is quite certain
that he had no conception of the gravity
of the moment. As late as ten o'clock at
night the Duke issued certain after-orders.
He had previously given general orders
(which presupposed no immediate attack),

4

50 WATERLOO

commanding movements which would in
the long-run have produced a concentra-
tion, but though these orders were ordered
to be executed " with as little delay as
possible," there was no hint of immediate
duty required, nor do the posts indicated
betray in any way the urgent need there
was to push men south and east at the top of
their speed, and relieve the Prussians from the
shock they were to receive on the morrow.

These general orders given — orders that
betray no grasp of the nearness of the
issue — Wellington went off to the Duchess
of Richmond's ball in what the impartial
historian cannot doubt to be ignorance of
the great stroke which Napoleon had so
nearly brought off upon that very day, and
would certainly attempt to bring off upon
the next.

In the midst of the ball, or rather during
the supper, definite news came in that the
French army had crossed the river Sambre,
and had even pushed its cavalry as far up
the Brussels road as Quatre Bras.

The Duke does not seem to have appreci-
ated even then what that should mean in
the way of danger to the Prussians, and
indeed of the breaking of the whole line.
He left the dance at about two in the
morning and went to bed,

THE PRELIMINARIES 51

He was not long left in repose. In the
bright morning sunlight, four hours after-
wards, he was roused by a visitor from the
frontier, and we have it upon his evidence
that the Duke at last understood what
was before him, and said that the con-
centration of his forces must be at Quatre
Bras.

In other words, Wellington knew or
appreciated extremely tardily on that
Friday morning about six that the blow
was about to fall upon his Prussian allies
to the south and east, and that it was the
business of his army upon the west to come
up rapidly in succour.

As will be seen in a moment, he failed ;
but it would be a very puerile judgment
of this great man and superb defensive
General to belittle his place in the history
of war upon the basis of even such errors as
these.

True, the error and the delay were pro-
digious and, in a fashion, comic ; and had
Napoleon delivered upon the Thursday
afternoon, as he had intended, an attack
which should have defeated the Prussians
before him, Wellington's error and delay
would have paid a very heavy price.

As it was, Napoleon's own delay in
crossing the Sambre made Wellington's

52 WATERLOO

mistake and tardiness bear no disastrous
fruit. The Duke failed to succour the
Prussians. His troops, scattered all over
Western Belgium, did not come up in time
to prevent the defeat of his allies at Ligny.
But he held his own at Quatre Bras ;
and in the final battle, forty-eight hours
later, the genius with which he handled
his raw troops upon the ridge of Mont St
Jean wiped out and negatived all his
strategical misconceptions of the previous

From this confusion, this partial delay
and error upon Napoleon's part, this ignor-
ance upon Wellington's of what was toward,
both of which marked Thursday the 15th,
we must turn to a detailed description of
that morrow, Friday the 16th, which,
though it is less remembered in history
than the crowning day of Waterloo, was,
in every military sense, the decisive day
of the campaign.

We shall see that it was Napoleon's
failure upon that Friday completely to de-
feat, or rather to destroy, the Prussian force
at Ligny — a failure largely due to Welling-
ton's neighbouring resistance at Quatre
Bras — which determined the Emperor's
final defeat upon the Sunday at Waterloo.

Ill

THE DECISIVE DAY

FRIDAY THE 16TH OF JUNE

QTJATRE BRAS AND LIGNY

WE have seen what the 15th of June was in
those four short days of which Waterloo
was to be the climax. That Thursday was
rilled with an advance, rapid and un-
expected, against the centre of the allied
line, and therefore against that weak point
where the two halves of the allied line
joined, to wit, Charleroi and the country
immediately to the north of that town and
bridge.

We have further seen that while the un-
expectedness of the blow was almost as
thorough as Napoleon could have wished,
the rapidity of its delivery, though con-
siderable, had been less than he had antici-
pated. He had got by the evening of the
day not much more than three-quarters of

53

54 WATERLOO

his forces across the river Sambre, and this
passage, which was mapped out for com-
pletion before nightfall, straggled on through
the whole morning of the morrow, — a tardi-
ness the effects of which we shall clearly
see in the next few pages.

Napoleon's intention, once the Sambre
was crossed, was to divide his army into
two bodies : one, on the left, was to be
entrusted to Ney; one, on the right, to
Grouchy. A reserve, which the Emperor
would command in person, was to consist
in the main of the Imperial Guard.

The left-hand body, under Ney, was to go
straight north up the great Brussels road.

Napoleon rightly estimated that he had
surprised the foe, though he exaggerated
the extent of that surprise. He thought
it possible that this body to the left, 'under
Ney, might push on to Brussels itself, and
in any case could easily deal with the small
and unprepared forces which it might meet
upon the way. Its function in any case,
whether resistance proved slight or formid-
able, was to hold the forces of Wellington
back from effecting a junction with Blucher
and the Prussians.

Meanwhile, the right-hand body, under
Grouchy, was to fall upon the extremity
of the Prussian line and overwhelm it.

THE DECISIVE DAY 55

Such an action against the head of the
long Prussian cordon could lead, as the
Emperor thought, to but one of two results :
either the great majority of the Prussian

force, coming up to retrieve this first dis-
aster, would be defeated in detail as it
came ; or, more probably, finding itself cut
off from all aid on the part of Wellington's
forces to the west and its head crushed,
the long Prussian line would roll up back-

56 WATERLOO

wards upon its communications towards
the east, whence it had come.

In either case the prime object of
Napoleon's sudden move would have been
achieved ; and, with the body upon the left,
under Ney, pushing up the Brussels road,
the body upon the right, under Grouchy,
pushing back the head of the Prussian line
eastward, the two halves of the Allies would
be separated altogether, and could later be
dealt with, each in turn. The capital dis-
advantage under which Napoleon suffered
— the fact that he had little more than half
as many men as his combined enemies —
would be neutralised, because he would,
after the separation of those enemies into
two bodies, be free to deal with either at
his choice. Their communications came
from diametrically opposite directions,1 and,
as the plan of each depended upon the co-
operation of the other, their separation
would leave them confused and without a
scheme.

Napoleon in all this exaggerated the
facility of the task before him ; but before
we go into that, it is essential that the
reader should grasp a certain character in
all military affairs, to misunderstand which
is to misread the history of armies.
1 See ante, pp. 27 and 32.

THE DECISIVE DAY 57

This characteristic is the necessary un-
certainty under which every commander lies
as to the disposition, the number, the order,
and the information of his opponents.

It is a necessary characteristic in all war-
fare, because it is a prime duty in the
conduct of war to conceal from your
enemy your numbers, your dispositions,
and the extent of your information. It is
a duty which every commander will always
fulfil to his best ability.

It is therefore a characteristic, be it
noted, which no development of human
science can conceivably destroy, for with
every advance in our means of communi-
cating information we advance also in
our knowledge of the means whereby the
new means of communication may be in-
terrupted. An advantage over the enemy
in the means one has of acquiring know-
ledge with regard to him must, of course,
always be of supreme importance, and
when those means are novel, one side or
the other is often beforehand for some years
with the new science of their use. When
such is the case, science appears to un-
instructed opinion to have changed this
ancient and fixed characteristic which is
in the very nature of war. But in fact
there has been no such change. Under

58 WATERLOO

the most primitive conditions an advantage
of this type was of supreme importance ;
under conditions the most scientific and
refined it is an advantage that may still
be neutralised if the enemy has learnt
means of screening himself as excellent as
our means of discovering him. Even the
aeroplane, whose development in the modern
French service has so vastly changed the
character of information, and therefore of
war, can never eliminate the factor of
which I speak. A service possessed of a
great superiority in this new arm will, of
course, be the master of its foe ; but when
the use of the new arm is spread and
equalised among all European forces so
that two opposing forces are equally
matched even in this new discovery, then
the old element of move and counter move,
feint, secrecy, and calculated confusion of
an adversary, will reappear.1

In general, then, to point out the ignor-
ance and the misconceptions of one com-
mander is no criticism of a campaign until
we have appreciated the corresponding

1 A lengthy digression might here be admitted upon
the question of how defence against aerial scouting will
develop. That it will develop none can doubt. Every
such advantage upon the part of one combatant has at
last been neutralised by the spread of a common
knowledge and a common method to all.

THE DECISIVE DAY 59

ignorance and misconceptions of the other.
We have already seen Wellington taken
almost wholly by surprise on the French
advance ; we shall see him, even when he
appreciated its existence, imagining it to
be directed principally against himself.
We shall similarly see Napoleon under-
estimating the Prussian force in front of
him, and underestimating even that tardy
information which had reached Wellington
in time for him to send troops up the
Brussels road, and to check the French
advance along it. But we must judge
either of the two great opponents not by
a single picture of his own misconceptions
alone, but by the combined picture of the
misconceptions of both, and especially by
a consideration of the way in which each
retrieved or attempted to retrieve the
results of those misconceptions when a
true idea of the enemy's dispositions was
conveyed to him.

Here, then, we have Napoleon on the
morning of Friday the 16th of June pre-
pared to deal with the Prussians. It is his
right-hand body, under Grouchy, which is
deputed to do this, while he sends up the
left-hand body, under Ney, northwards to

60 WATERLOO

brush aside, or, at the worst, at least to
hold off whatever of the Duke of Welling-
ton's command may be found upon the
Brussels road attempting to join the
Prussians.

The general plan of what happened upon
that decisive 16th is simple enough.

The left-hand body, under Ney, goes
forward up the Brussels road, finds more
resistance than it expected, but on the
whole performs its task and prevents any
effective help being given by the western
half of the Allies— Wellingt on' s half— to the
eastern half — the Prussian half. But it
only prevents that task with difficulty and
at the expense of a tactical defeat. This
action is called Quatre Bras.

Meanwhile, the right-hand body equally
accomplishes the elements of its task,
engages the head of the Prussian line and
defeats it, with extreme difficulty, just
before dark. This action is called Ligny.

But the minor business conducted by
the left, under Ney, is only just successful,
and successful only in the sense that it
does, at vast expense, prevent a junction
of Wellington with Blucher. The major
business conducted on the right, by Napo-
leon himself, in support of Grouchy, is dis-
appointing. The head of the Prussian line

THE DECISIVE DAY 61

is not destroyed ; the Prussian army, though
beaten, is free to retreat in fair order, and
almost in what direction it chooses.

The ultimate result is that Wellington
and Blucher do manage to effect their
junction on the day after the morrow of
Ligny and Quatre Bras, and thus defeat
Napoleon at Waterloo.

Now, why were both these operations,
Quatre Bras and Ligny, incompletely suc-
cessful ? Partly because there was more
resistance along the Brussels road than
Napoleon had expected, and a far larger
body of Prussians in front of him than he
had expected either ; but much more because
a whole French army corps, which, had it been
in action, could have added a third to the
force of either the right or the left wing, was
out of action all day ; and wandered aimlessly
over the empty zone which separated Ney
from Grouchy, Quatre Bras from Ligny, the
left half of Napoleon's divided army from
its right half.

This it was which prevented what might
have been possible — the thrusting back of
Wellington along the Brussels road, and
even perhaps the disorganisation of his
forces. This it was which missed what
was otherwise certainly possible — the total
ruin of the Prussian army.

62 WATERLOO

This army corps thus thrown away un-
used in hours of aimless marching and
countermarching was the First Army
Corps. Its commander was Erlon ; and
the enormous blunder or fatality which
permitted Erlon and his 20,000 to be as
useless upon the 16th of June as though
they had been wiped out in some defeat
is what makes of the 16th of June the
decisive day of the campaign.

It was Erlon's failure to be present either
with Ney or with Grouchy, either upon the
left or upon the right, either at Quatre Bras
or at Ligny, while each of those two actions
were in doubt, which made it possible for
Wellington's troops to stand undefeated in
the west, for the Prussians to retire — not
intact, but still an army — from the east, and
for both to unite upon the day after the
morrow, the Sunday, and destroy the
French army at Waterloo.

It is upon Erlon's blunder or misfortune
that the whole issue turns, and upon the
Friday, the 16th of June, in the empty fields
between Quatre-Bras and Ligny, much
more than upon the famous Sunday at
Waterloo, that the fate of Napoleon's army
was decided.

In order to make this clear, let us first
follow what happened in the operations of

THE DECISIVE DAY 63

Napoleon's right wing against the Prussians
opposed to it, — operations which bear in
history the name of "the Battle of Ligny."

LIGNY

" // they fight here they will be damnably
mauled."

(Wellington's words on seeing the defen-
sive positions chosen by the Prussians at
Ligny.)

Napoleon imagined that when he had
crossed the Sambre with the bulk of his
force, the suddenness of his attack (for,
though retarded as we have seen, and though
leaving troops upon the wrong bank of the
river, it was sudden) would find the
Prussian forces in the original positions
wherein he knew them to have lain before
he marched. He did not think that they
would yet have had the time, still less the
intention, to concentrate. Those original
positions the map upon p. 41 makes plain.

The 124,000 men and more, which lay
under the supreme command of Blucher,
had been spread before the attack began
along the whole extended line from Liege to
Charier oi, and had been disposed regularly
from left to right in four corps d'armee,

64 WATERLOO

The first of these had its headquarters in
Charleroi itself, its furthest outpost was
but five miles east of the town, its three
brigades had Charleroi for their centre ;
its reserve cavalry was at Sombreffe, its
reserve artillery at Gembloux. The Second
Corps had its headquarters twenty miles
away east, at Namur, and occupied posts
in the country as far off as Hannut (thirty
miles away from Charleroi).

The Third Corps had its headquarters
at Ciney in the Ardennes, and was scattered
in various posts throughout that forest, its
furthest cantonment being no nearer than
Dinant, which, by the only good road
available, was nearer forty than thirty
miles from Napoleon's point of attack.

Finally, the Fourth Corps was as far away
as Liege (nearer fifty than forty miles by
road from the last cantonment of the First
Corps), and having its various units scattered
round the neighbourhood of that town.

Napoleon, therefore, attacking Charleroi
suddenly, imagined that he would have to
deal only with the First Corps at Charleroi
and its neighbourhood. He did not think
that the other three corps had information
in time to enable them to come up west-
ward towards the end of the line and meet
him. The outposts of the First Corps had,

THE DECISIVE DAY 65

of course, fallen back before the advance
of the Emperor's great army ; the mass of
that First Corps was, he knew, upon this
morning of the 16th, some mile or two north
and east of Fleurus, astraddle of the great
road which leads from Charleroi to Gem-
bloux. At the very most, and supposing
this First Corps (which was of 33,000 men,
under Ziethen) had received reinforcements
from the nearest posts of the Second and
the Third Corps, Napoleon did not think
that he could have in front of him more
than some 40,000 men at the most.

He was in error. It had been arranged
among the Prussian leaders that resistance
to Napoleon, when occasion might come
for it, should be offered in the neighbour-
hood of the cross-roads where the route
from Charleroi to Gembloux crosses that
from Nivelles to Namur. In other words,
they were prepared to stand and fight
between Sombreffe and the village of Ligny.
The plan had been prepared long before-
hand. The whole of the First Corps was
in position with the morning, awaiting the
Emperor's attack. The Second Corps had
been in motion for hours, and was marching
up during all that morning. So was the
Third Corps behind it. Blucher himself
had arrived upon the field of battle the day

5

66 WATERLOO

before (the 15th), and had written thence
to his sovereign to say that he was fully
prepared for action the next day.

Indeed, Blucher on the 15th confidently
expected victory, and the end of the cam-
paign then and there. He had a right to do
so, for Napoleon's advance had been met by
so rapid a concentration that, a little after
noon on that Friday the 16th, and before
the first shots were fired, well over 80,000
men were drawn up to receive the shock
of Napoleon's right wing. But that right
wing all told, even when the belated French
troops beyond the Sambre had finally
crossed that river, and even when the
Emperor had brought up the Guard and
the reserve, numbered but 63,000. Sup-
posing the French had been able to use
every man, which they were not, they
counted but seven to nine of their opponents.
And the nine were upon the defensive ; the
seven had to undertake the task of an
assault.

It was late in the day before battle was
joined. Napoleon had reached Fleurus at
about ten o'clock in the morning, but it
was four hours more before he had brought
all his troops across the river, and by
the time he had done so two things had
happened. First, the Duke of Wellington

68 WATERLOO

(who, as we shall see later, had come to
Quatre Bras that morning, and had written
to Blucher telling him of his arrival) rode
off in person to the Prussian positions and
discussed affairs near the windmill of
Bussy with the Prussian Commander-in-
chief. In this conversation, Wellington
undoubtedly promised to effect, if he could,
a junction with the Prussians in the course
of the afternoon. Even without that aid
Blucher felt fairly sure of victory ; with it,
he could be perfectly confident.

As matters turned out, Wellington found
himself unable to effect his junction with
Blucher. Ney, as we shall see later, found
in front of him on the Brussels road much
heavier opposition than he had imagined,
but Wellington was also surprised to find
to what strength the French force under
Ney was at Quatre Bras. Wellington, as
we shall see, held his own on that 16th of
June, but was quite unable to come up in
succour of Blucher when the expected
victory of that general turned to a defeat.

The second thing that happened in those
hours was Napoleon's discovery that the
Prussian troops massing to oppose him
before Ligny were going to be much more
than a single corps. It looked to him more
like the whole Prussian army. It was,

ind

THE DECISIVE DAY 69

indeed, three-quarters of that army, for it
consisted of the First, the Second, and the
Third Corps. Only the Fourth, with its
headquarters at distant Liege, had not been
able to arrive in time. This Fourth Corps
would also have been present, and would
probably have turned the scale in favour
of the Prussians, had the staff orders been
sent out promptly and conveyed with
sufficient rapidity. As it was, its most
advanced units got no further west, during
the course of the action, than about half-
way between Liege and the battlefield.

Napoleon was enabled to discover with
some ease the great numbers which had
concentrated to oppose him from the fact
that these numbers had concentrated upon
a defective position. Wellington, the
greatest defensive general of his time, at
once discovered this weakness in Blucher's
chosen battlefield, and was provoked by
the discovery to the exclamation which
stands at the head of this section. The
rolling land occupied by the Prussian army
lay exposed in a regular sweep downwards
towards the heights upon which lay the
French, and the Prussian army as it
deployed came wholly under the view of
its enemy. Nothing was hidden ; and a
further effect was that, as Napoleon him-

70 WATERLOO

self remarked, all the artillery work of the
French side went home. If a round missed
the foremost positions of the Prussian
army, it would necessarily fall within the
ranks behind them.

This discovery, that there lay before him
not one corps but a whole army, seemed to
Napoleon, upon one condition, an advan-
tage. The new development would, upon
that one condition, give him, if his troops
were of the quality he estimated them to be,
a complete victory over the united Prussian
force, and might well terminate the campaign
on that afternoon and in that place. That
one condition was the possibility of getting
Ney upon the left, or some part at least of
Ney's force, to leave the task of holding off
Wellington, to come down upon the flank
of the Prussians from the north and west,
to envelop them, and thus, in company with
the troops of Napoleon himself, to destroy
the three Prussian Army Corps altogether.

Had that condition been fulfilled, the
campaign would indeed have come to an
end decisively in Napoleon's favour, and,
as he put it in a famous phrase, " not a gun "
of the army opposing him " should escape."

Unfortunately for the Emperor, that one
condition was not fulfilled. The 63,000
Frenchmen of the right wing, under

THE DECISIVE DAY 71

Napoleon, did indeed defeat and drive off
the 80,000 men opposed to them. But
that opposing army was not destroyed; it
was not contained; it remained organised
for further fighting, and it survived to
decide Waterloo.

In order to appreciate Napoleon's idea
and how it might have succeeded, let the
reader consider the dispositions of the
battle of Ligny.

The battlefield named in history after
the village of Ligny consists of a number
of communes, of which that village is the
central one. The Prussian army held the
villages marked on the map by the names
of Tongrinelle and Tongrinne, to the east
of Ligny ; it held Brye, St Amand, and
Wagnelee to the east. It held also the
heights behind upon the great road leading
from Nivelles to Namur. When Napoleon
had at last got his latest troops over from
beyond the Sambre on to the field of battle,
which was not until just on two o'clock in
the afternoon, the plan he formed was to
hold the Prussian left and centre by a
vigorous attack, that is, to pin the
Prussians down to Tongrinne, Tongrinelle,
and Ligny, while, on the other front, the
east and south front of the Prussians,
another vigorous attack should be driving

THE DECISIVE DAY 73

them back out of Wagnelee and St
Amand.

The plan can be further elucidated by
considering the elements of the battle as
they are sketched in the map over leaf.
Napoleon's troops at C C C were to hold the
Prussian left at H, to attack the Prussian
right at D, with the Guard at E left in
reserve for the final effort.

By thus holding the Prussians at H and
pushing them in at D, he would here begin
to pen them back, and it needed but the
arrival on the field of a fresh French force
attacking the Prussians along A B to destroy
the force so contained and hemmed in. For
that fresh force Napoleon depended upon
new and changed instructions which he de-
spatched to Ney when he saw the size of
the Prussian force before him. During
Napoleon's main attack, some portion of
Ney's force, and if possible the whole of it,
should appear unexpectedly from the north
and west, marching down across the fields
between Wagnelee and the Nivelles-Namur
road, and coming on the north of the enemy
at A B, so as to attack him not only in the
flank but in the rear. He would then be
unable to retreat in the direction of W awe
(W) — a broken remnant might escape to-
wards Namur (N) . But it was more likely

THE DECISIVE DAY 75

that the whole force would be held and
destroyed.

Supposing that Napoleon's 63,000 showed
themselves capable of holding, let alone
partially driving in, the 80,000 in front of
them, the sudden and unexpected appear-
ance of a new force in the height of the
action, adding another twenty or thirty
thousand to the French troops already
engaged, coming upon the flank and spread-
ing to the rear of the Prussian host, would
inevitably have destroyed that host, and,
to repeat Napoleon's famous exclamation,
" not a gun would have escaped."

The reader may ask : " If this plan of
victory be so obvious, why did Napoleon
send Ney off with a separate left wing of
forty to fifty thousand men towards Quatre
Bras ? "

The answer is : that when, upon the day
before, the Thursday, Napoleon had made
this disposition, and given it as the general
orders for that Friday, he had imagined
only one corps of Prussians to be before
him.

The right wing, with which the Emperor
himself stayed, numbering, as we have seen,
about 63,000 men, would have been quite
enough to deal with that one Prussian
corps ; and he had sent so large a force, under

76 WATERLOO

Ney, up the Brussels road, not because he
believed it would meet with serious opposi-
tion, but because this was to be the line of
his principal advance, and it was his
intention to occupy the town of Brussels
at the very first opportunity. Having
dealt with the single Prussian corps, as he
had first believed it would be, in front of
Fleurus, he meant that same evening to
come back in person to the Brussels road
and, in company with Ney, to conduct
decisive operations against Wellington's
half of the Allies, which would then, of
course, be hopelessly outnumbered.

But when Napoleon saw, a little after
midday of the Friday, that he had to deal
with nearly the whole of the Prussian army,
he perceived that the great force under
Ney would be wasted out there on the west
— supposing it to be meeting with little
opposition — and had far better be used in
deciding a crushing victory over the Prus-
sians. To secure such a victory would,
without bothering about the Duke of
Wellington's forces to the westward, be
quite enough to determine the campaign
in favour of the French.

As early as two o'clock a note was sent
to Ney urging him, when he had brushed
aside such slight resistance as the Emperor

THE DECISIVE DAY 77

expected him to find upon the Brussels
road, to return and help to envelop the
Prussian forces, which the Emperor was
about to attack. At that hour it was not
yet quite clear to Napoleon how large the
Prussian force really was. This first note
to Ney, therefore, was unfortunately not
as vigorous as it might have been ; though,
even if it had been as vigorous as possible,
Ney, who had found unexpected resistance
upon the Brussels road, could certainly
not have come up to help Napoleon with
his whole force. He might, however, have
spared a portion of it, and that portion, as
we shall see later, would have been most
obviously Erlon's corps — the First. Rather
more than an hour later, at about a quarter-
past three, when Napoleon had just joined
battle with the Prussians, he got a note
from Ney informing him that the left wing
was meeting with considerable resistance,
and could hardly abandon the place where
it was engaged before Quatre Bras to come
up against the Prussian flank at Ligny.
Napoleon sent a note back to say that,
none the less, an effort must be made at
all costs to send Ney's forces to come over
to him to attack the Prussian flank, for such
an attack would mean the winning of a
great decisive battle.

78 WATERLOO

The distance over which these notes had
to be carried to and fro, from Napoleon to
Ney, was not quite five miles. The Emperor
might therefore fairly expect after his last
message that in the late middle of the after-
noon— say half -past five or six — troops
would appear upon his north-west horizon
and march down to his aid. In good time
such troops did appear ; how inconclusively
it will be my business to record.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had begun the fight
at Ligny with his usual signal of three
cannonshots, and between three and four
o'clock the front of the whole army was
engaged. It was for many hours mere
hammer-and-tongs fighting, the French
making little impression upon their right
against Ligny or the villages to the east of
it, but fighting desperately for St Amand
and for Wagnelee. Such a course was part
of Napoleon's plan, for he had decided,
as I have said, only to hold the Prussian
left, to strike hardest at their right, and,
when his reinforcement should come
from Ney, to turn that right, envelop
it, and so destroy the whole Prussian
army.

These villages upon the Prussianjright
were taken and retaken in a series of
furious attacks and counter-attacks, which

THE DECISIVE DAY 79

it would be as tedious to detail as it must
have been intolerable to endure.

All this indecisive but furious struggle
for the line of villages (not one of which
was as yet carried and held permanently
by the French) lasted over two hours. It
was well after five o'clock when there
appeared, far off, under the westering sun,
a new and large body of troops advancing
eastward as though to reach that point
between Wagnelee and St Amand where
the left of the French force was struggling
for mastery with the right of the Prussians.
For a moment there was no certitude as
to what this distant advancing force might
be. But soon, and just when fortune
appeared for a moment to be favouring
Blucher's superior numbers and the French
line was losing ground, the Emperor learned
that it was his First Army Corps, under the
command of Erlon which was thus ap-
proaching.

At that moment — in the neighbourhood
of six o'clock in the evening — Napoleon
must have believed that his new and
rapidly formed plan of that afternoon,
with its urgent notes to Quatre Bras and
its appeal for reinforcement, had borne
fruit ; a portion at least of Ney's command
had been detached, as it seemed, to deliver

80 WATERLOO

that final and unexpected attack upon the
Prussian flank which was the keystone of
the whole scheme.

Coincidently with the news that those
distant advancing thousands were his own
men and would turn this doubtful struggle
into a decisive victory for the Emperor
came the news — unexplained, inexplicable
— that Erlon's troops would advance no
further ! That huge distant body of men,
isolated in the empty fields to the west-
ward ; that reinforcement upon which the
fate of Napoleon and of the French army
hung, drew no nearer. Watched from
such a distance, they might seem for a
short time to be only halted. Soon it was
apparent that they were actually retiring.
They passed back again, retracing their
steps beyond the western horizon, and were
lost to the great struggle against the
Prussians. Why this amazing counter-
march, with all its catastrophic con-
sequences was made will be discussed
later. It is sufficient to note that it
rendered impossible that decisive victory
which Napoleon had held for a moment
within his grasp. His resource under such
a disappointment singularly illustrates the
nature of his mind.

Already the Emperor had determined,

THE DECISIVE DAY 81

before any sign of advancing aid had
appeared, that if he were left alone to
complete the decision, if he was not to be
allowed by fate to surround and destroy
the Prussian force, he might at least drive
it from the field with heavy loss, and, as
far as possible, demoralised. In the long
struggle of the afternoon he had meant
but to press the Prussian line, while await-
ing forces that should complete its envelop-
ment ; these forces being now denied him,
he determined to change his plan, to use
his reserves, the Guard, and to drive the
best fighting material he had, like a spear-
head, at the centre of the Prussian positions.
Since he could not capture, he would try
and break.

As the hope of aid from Erlon's First
Corps gradually disappeared, he decided
upon this course. It was insufficient. He
could not hope by it to destroy his enemy
wholly. But he could drive him from the
field and perhaps demoralise him, or so
weaken him with loss as to leave him
crippled.

Just at the time when Napoleon had
determined thus to strike at the centre of
the Prussian line, Blucher, full of his recent
successes upon his right and the partial
recapture of the village of St Amand, had

6

82 WATERLOO

withdrawn troops from that centre to
pursue his advantage. It was the wrong
moment. While Blucher was thus off with
the bulk of his men towards St Amand,
the Old Guard, with the heavy cavalry of
the Guard, and Milhaud's cavalry as well
— all Napoleon's reserve — drew up opposite
Ligny village for a final assault.

Nearly all the guns of the Guard and all
those of the Fourth Corps crashed against
the village to prepare the assault, and at
this crisis of the battle, as though to
emphasise its character, a heavy thunder-
storm broke over the combatants, and at
that late hour (it was near seven) darkened
the evening sky.

It was to the noise and downpour of
that storm that the assault was delivered,
the Prussian centre forced, and Ligny taken.

When the clouds cleared, a little before
sunset, this strongest veteran corps of
Napoleon's army had done the business.
Ligny was carried and held. The Prussian
formation, from a convex line, was now a
line bent inwards at its centre and all but
broken.

Blucher had rapidly returned from the
right to meet the peril. He charged at
the head of his Uhlans. The head of the
French column of Guards reserved their

THE DECISIVE DAY 83

fire until the horse was almost upon them ;
then, in volley after volley at a stone's-
throw range, they broke that cavalry,
which, in their turn, the French cuirassiers
charged as it fled and destroyed it.
Blucher's own horse was shot under him,
the colonel of the Uhlans captured, the
whole of the Prussian centre fell into dis-
order and was crushed confusedly back
towards the Nivelles-Namur road.

Darkness fell, and nothing more could
be accomplished. The field was won, in-
deed, but the Prussian army was still an
organisation and a power. It had lost
heavily in surrenders, flight, and fallen,
but its main part was still organised. It
was driven to retreat in the darkness, but
remained ready, when time should serve, to
reappear. It kept its order against the
end of the French pressure throughout the
last glimmer of twilight ; and when dark-
ness fell, the troops of Blucher, though in
retreat, were in a retreat compact and
orderly, and the bulk of his command was
saved from the enemy and available for
further action.

Thus ended the battle of Ligny, glorious
for the Emperor, who had achieved so
much success against great odds and after
the hottest combat ; but a failure of his

84 WATERLOO

full plan, for the host before him was still
in existence : it was free to retreat in what
direction, east or north, it might choose.
The choice was made with immediate and
conquering decision : the order passed in
the darkness, " By Tilly on Wavre." The
Prussian staff had not lost its head under
the blow of its defeat. It preserved a
clear view of the campaign, with its remain-
ing chances, and the then beaten army
corps were concentrated upon a movement
northwards. Word was sent to the fresh
and unused Fourth Corps to join the other
three at Wavre, and the march was begun
which permitted Blucher, forty hours later,
to come up on the flank of the French at
Waterloo and destroy them.

QTJATRE BRAS

Such had been the result of the long
afternoon's work upon the right-hand or
eastern battlefield, that of Ligny, where
Napoleon had been in personal command.

In spite of his appeals, no one had reached
him from the western field, and the First
Corps had only appeared in Napoleon's
neighbourhood to disappear again.

What had been happening on that
western battlefield, three to four miles

THE DECISIVE DAY 85

away, which had thus prevented some
part at least of Ney's army coming up
upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny,
towards the end of the day, and inflicting
upon Blucher a complete disaster ?

What had happened was the slow, con-
fused action known to history as the battle
of Quatre Bras.

It will be remembered that Ney had been
entrusted by Napoleon with the absolute
and independent command of something
less than half of his whole army.1

He had put at his disposal the First and
the Second Army Corps, under Erlon and
Reille respectively — nearly 46,000 men ;
and to these he had added, by an after-
thought, eight regiments of heavy cavalry,
commanded by Kellerman.

The role of this force, in Napoleon's
intention, was simply to advance up the
Brussels road, brushing before it towards
the left or west, away from the Prussians,
as it went, the outposts of that western
half of the allied army, which Wellington
commanded.

We have seen that Napoleon, who had

certainly arrived quickly and half-unex-

pectedly at the point of junction between

Wellington's scattered forces and those of

1 To be accurate, not quite five-twelfths.

86 WATERLOO

the Prussians, when he crossed the Sambre
at Charleroi, overestimated his success.
He thought his enemy had even less notice
of his advance than that enemy really had ;
he thought that enemy had had less time
to concentrate than he had really had.
Napoleon therefore necessarily concluded
that Ms enemy had concentrated to a less
extent than he actually had.

That mistake had the effect, in the case
of the army of the right, which he himself
commanded, of bringing him up against
not one Prussian army corps but three.
This accident had not disconcerted him,
for he hoped to turn it into a general
disaster for the Prussians, and to take
advantage of their unexpected concentra-
tion to accomplish their total ruin. But
such a plan was dependent upon the left-
hand or western army, that upon the
Brussels road under Ney, not finding
anything serious in front of it. Ney could
spare men less easily if the Emperor's
calculation of the resistance likely to be
found on the Brussels road should be
wrong. It was wrong. That resistance
was not slight but considerable, and Ney
was not free to come to Napoleon's aid.
Tardy as had been the information con-
veyed to the Duke of Wellington, and

THE DECISIVE DAY 87

grievously as the Duke of Wellington had
misunderstood its importance, there was
more in front of Ney upon the Brussels
road than the Emperor had expected.
What there was, however, might have been
pushed back — after fairly heavy fighting it
is true, but without any risk of failure —
but for another factor in the situation,
which was Ney's own misjudgment and
inertia.

Napoleon himself said later that his
marshal was no longer the same man since
the disasters of two years before ; but even
if Ney had been as alert as ever, misjudg-
ment quite as much as lack of will must
have entered into what he did. He had
thought, as the Emperor had, that there
would be hardly anything in front of him
upon the Brussels road. But there was
this difference between the two errors :
Ney was on the spot, and could have found
out with his cavalry scouts quite early on
the morning of Friday the 16th what he
really had to face. He preferred to take
matters for granted, and he paid a heavy
price. He thought that there was plenty
of time for him to advance at his leisure ;
and, thinking this, he must have further
concluded that to linger upon that part of
the Brussels road which was nearest the

88 WATERLOO

Emperor's forthcoming action to the east
by Ligny would be good policy in case the
Emperor should have need of him there.

On the night of the 15th Ney himself
was at Frasnes, while the furthest of his
detachments was no nearer than the bridge
of Thuin over the Sambre, sixteen miles
away. The rough sketch printed opposite
will show how very long that line was,
considering the nearness of the strategical
point Quatre Bras, which it was his next
business to occupy. The Second Army
Corps under Reille was indeed fairly well
moved up, and all in the neighbourhood
of Gosselies by the night between Thursday
15th and Friday 16th of June. But the
other half of the force, the First Army
Corps under Erlon, was strung out over
miles of road behind.

To concentrate all those 50,000 men, half
of them spread out over so much space,
meant a day's ordinary marching ; and one
would have thought that Ney should have
begun to concentrate before night fell upon
the 15th. He remembered, however, that
the men were fatigued, he thought he had
plenty of time before him, and he did not
effect their concentration. The mass of the
Second Army Corps (Reille's) was, as I
have said, near Gosselies on the Friday

90 WATERLOO

dawn ; but Erlon, with the First Army
Corps, was not in disposition to bring the
bulk of it up by the same time. He could
not expect to be near Quatre Bras till
noon or one o'clock. But even to this
element of delay, due to his lack of pre-
cision, Ney added further delay, due to
slackness in orders.

It was eleven o'clock on the morning
of that Friday the 16th before Ney sent
a definite order to Reille to march ; it was
twelve before the head of that Second
Army Corps set out up the great road to
cover the four or five miles that separated
them from Ney's headquarters at Frasnes.
Erlon, lying next behind Reille, could not
advance until Reille' s last division had
taken the road. So Erlon, with the First
Army Corps, was not in column and begin-
ning his advance with his head troops
until after one o'clock.

At about half-past one, then, we have
the first troops of Reille' s army corps
reaching Ney at Frasnes, its tail-end some
little way out of Gosselies ; while at the
same hour we have Erlon' s First Army
Corps marching in column through Gos-
selies.

It would have been perfectly possible, at
the expense of a little fatigue to the men, to

THE DECISIVE DAY 91

have had the Second Army Corps right up
at Frasnes and in front of it and deployed
for action by nine o'clock, while Erlon's
army corps, the First, coming behind it as a
reserve, an equal body in numbers, excellence,
and order, would have taken the morning
to come up. In other words, Ney could
have had more than 20,000 men ready for
the attack on Quatre Bras by mid-morning,
with as many men an hour or two behind
them, and ready on their arrival to act as a
reserve. As a matter of fact, he waited
with his single battalion and a few horse-
men at his headquarters at Frasnes, only
giving the orders we have seen, which did
not bring Reille's head columns up to him
till as late as half-past one. It was well
after two o'clock before Reille's troops had
deployed in front of Frasnes and this Second
Army Corps were ready to attack the posi-
tion at Quatre Bras, which Ney still believed
to be very feebly held. The other half of
Ney's command, the First Army Corps, under
Erlon, was still far away down the road.

This said, it behoves us to consider the
strategical value of the Quatre Bras position,
and later to see how far Ney was right in
thinking that it was still quite insufficiently
furnished with defenders, even at that late
hour in the day.

92 WATERLOO

Armies must march by roads. At any
rate, the army marching by road has a
vast advantage over one attempting an
advance across country ; and the better
kept-up the road the greater advantage,
other things being equal, has the army
using it over another army debarred from
its u,se.

Quatre Bras is the cross- way of two great
roads. The first road is that main road
from north to south, leading from the frontier
and Charleroi to Brussels ; along this road,
it was Napoleon's ultimate intention to
sweep, and up this road he was on that
morning of the 16th sending Ney to clear
the way for him. The second road is the
great road east and west from Nivelles to
Namur, which was in June 1815 the main
line of communication along which the two
halves of the Allies could effect their
junction.

The invader, then, when he held Quatre
Bras, could hold up troops coming against
him from the north, troops coming against
him from the east, or troops coming against
him from the west. He could prevent, or
rather delay, their junction. He would
have stepped in between.

But Quatre Bras has advantages greater
than this plain and elementary strategical

THE DECISIVE DAY 93

advantage. In the first place, it dominates
the whole countryside. A patch or knoll,
520 feet above the sea, the culminating
point of the plateau, is within a few yards of
the cross-roads. Standing there, a few
steps to the west of the highway, you look
in every direction over a rolling plain, of
which you occupy the highest point for
some miles around.

Now, this position of the " Quatre Bras "
or " Cross Roads" can be easily defended
against a foe coming from the south, as
were the two corps under Ney. In 1815
its defence was easier still.

A large patch of undergrowth, cut in
rotation, called the Wood of Bossu, ran
along the high road from Frasnes and
Charleroi, flanking that road to the west,
and forming cover for troops that might
wish to forbid access along it. The ground
falls somewhat rapidly in front of the cross-
roads to a little stream, and just where the
stream crosses the road is the walled farm
of Gemioncourt, which can be held as an
advanced position, while in front of the
fields where the Wood of Bossu once stood
is the group of farm buildings called Pierre-
pont. Finally, that arm of the cross-roads
which overlooks the slope down to Gemion-
court ran partly on an embankment which

94 WATERLOO

could be used for defence as a ready-made
earthwork.

Now, let us see what troops were actually
present that Friday morning upon the
allied side to defend this position against
Ney's advance, and what others were
near enough in the neighbourhood to come
up in defence of the position during the
struggle.

There was but one division of the Allies
actually on the spot. This was the Nether-
lands division, commanded by Perponcher ;
and the whole of it, including gunners and
sappers (it had hardly any cavalry1 with
it), was less than 8000 strong. It was a very
small number to hold the extended posi-
tion which the division at once proceeded
to occupy. They had to cover a front of
over 3000 yards, not far short of two miles.

They did not know, indeed, what Ney

1 It is worth remarking that Perponcher had been
told by Wellington, when he first heard of Napoleon's
approach, to remain some miles off to the west at
Nivelles. Wellington laboured, right up to the battle
of Waterloo, under the fantastic impression that the
French, or a considerable body of them, were, for some
extraordinary reason, going to leave the Brussels road,
go round westward and attack his right. He was, as
might be expected of a defensive genius, nervous for his
communications. Luckily for Wellington, Perponcher
simply disobeyed these orders, left Nivelles before
dawn, was at Quatre Bras before sunrise, and proceeded
to act as we shall see above.

THE DECISIVE DAY 95

was bringing up against them ; Wellington
himself, later on, greatly underestimated
the French forces on that day. Now even
if Ney had had far less men than he had,
it was none the less a very risky thing to
disperse the division as Perponcher did,
especially with no more than fourteen guns
to support him,1 but under the circum-
stances it turned out to be a wise risk to
have taken. Ney had hesitated already, and
was in a mood to be surprised at any
serious resistance. The more extended the
veil that was drawn before him, the better
for the Allies and their card of delay. For
everything depended upon time. Ney, as
will be seen, had thrown away his chance
of victory by his extreme dilatoriness, and
during the day the Allies were to bring up
unit after unit, until by nightfall nearly
40,000 men not only held Quatre Bras
successfully, but pushed the French back
from their attack upon it.

Perponcher, then, put a battalion and
five guns in front of Gemioncourt, another
battalion inside the walls of the farm, four
battalions and a mounted battery before
the Wood of Bossu and the farm of Pierre-
pont. Most of his battalions were thus
stretched in front of the position of Quatre
1 Or at the most sixteen.

96 WATERLOO

Bras, the actual Cross Roads where he left
only two as a reserve.

Against the Dutchmen, thus extended,
the French order to advance was given,
and somewhere between half-past two and
a quarter to three the French attack began.
It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the
fields to the right or east of the Brussels
road.

The action that followed is one simple
enough to understand by description, but
difficult to express upon a map. It is
difficult to express upon a map because it
consisted in the repeated attack of one
fixed number of men against an increasing
number of men.

Ney was hammering all that afternoon
with a French force which soon reached
its maximum. The position against which
he was hammering, though held at first by
a force greatly inferior to his own, began
immediately afterwards to receive rein-
forcement after reinforcement, until at
the close of the action the defenders were
vastly superior in numbers to the attackers.

I have attempted in the rough pen sketch
opposite this page to express this state of
affairs on the allied side during the battle
by marking in successive degrees of shading
the bodies of the defence in the order in

THE DECISIVE DAY

97

which they came up, but the reader must
remember the factor of time, and how all
day long Wellington's command at Quatre
Bras kept on swelling and swelling by drib-

.
0/hfll tfti. Vvotl-UAAt. W»12

ni mi

SW*K . .

Ou

1* C«J>VMim«wiL woo TVinwiiwia. iuu

lets, as the units marched in at a hurried
summons from various points behind the
battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of
the defence gives all its character to the
action.

7

98 WATERLOO

The French, then, began the assault by
an advance to the right or east of the
Brussels road. They cleared out the
defenders from Gemioncourt ; they occu-
pied that walled position; they poured
across the stream, and were beginning
to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when,
at about three o'clock, Wellington, who had
been over at Ligny discussing the position
with Blucher, rode up and saw how critical
the moment was.

In a few minutes the first French division
might be up to the cross-roads at Q.

Bossu Wood, with the four battalions
holding it, had not yet been attacked by
the French, because their second division
of Reille's Second Corps (under Napoleon's
brother Jerome), had not yet come up ;
Erlon's First Corps was still far off, down
the road. The men in the Bossu Wood
came out to try and stop the French
advance. They were thrown back by
French cavalry, and even as this was pro-
ceeding Jerome's division arrived, attacked
the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up
the whole of Ney's forces to some 19,000
or 20,000 men.

The French advance, so continued, would
now undoubtedly have succeeded against
the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three

THE DECISIVE DAY 99

o'clock (and Wellington's judgment that
the situation was critical at that same
moment was only too sound) had there not
arrived precisely at that moment the first
of his reinforcements.

A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from
the west along the Nivelles road, and three
brigades of infantry appeared marching
hurriedly in from the north, along the
Brussels road ; two of these brigades
were British, under the command of Kemp
and of Pack, and they formed Picton's
division. The third were a brigade of
Hanoverians, under Best. The British and
the Hanoverians formed along the Namur
road at M N, protected by its embankment,
kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire
when the enemy's attacking line should
come within close range of their muskets.

The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on
the other side of the road, charged the
advancing French, but were charged them-
selves in turn by French cavalry, over-
thrown, and in their stampede carried
Wellington and his staff in a surge past the
cross-roads ; but the French cavalry, in its
turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry
fire it met when it had ridden too far.
Immediately afterwards the French infantry
as they reached the Namur road came

100 WATERLOO

unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British
and Hanoverians, and were driven back in
disorder by heavy volleying at close range
from the embankment and the deep cover
beyond.

The cavalry charge and countercharge
(Jerome beginning to clear the south of the
Bossu Wood), the check received by the
French on the right from Picton's brigade
and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an
hour. It was not far short of four o'clock
when Ney received that first urgent dis-
patch from Napoleon which told him to
despatch the enemy's resistance at Quatre
Bras, and then to come over eastward to
Ligny and help against the Prussians.

Ney could not obey. He had wasted
the whole of a precious morning, and by
now, close on four o'clock in the afternoon,
yet another unit came up to increase the
power of the defence, and to make his
chance of carrying the Quatre Bras cross-
roads, of pushing back Wellington's com-
mand, of finding himself free to send men
to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.

The new unit which had come up was
the corps under the Duke of Brunswick,
and when this arrived Wellington had
for the first time a superiority of numbers
over Ney's single corps (there was still no

mom nf T

THE DECISIVE DAY 101

sign of Erlon) though he was still slightly
inferior in guns.

However, the French advance was vigor-
ously conducted. Nearly the whole of the
Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Bruns-
wickers, who had been sent forward along
the road between Quatre Bras and Gemion-
court, were pushed back as to their infantry ;
their cavalry broke itself against a French
battalion.

It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort
that the Duke of Brunswick, son of the
famous General of the earlier Revolutionary
wars, fell, shot in the stomach. He died
that night in the village.

The check to this general advance of the
French all along the line was again given by
the English troops along the Namur road.
Picton seized the moment, ordered a
bayonet charge, and drove the French
right down the valley. His men were in
turn driven back by the time they had
cleared the slope, but the check was given
and the French never recovered it. Two
fierce cavalry charges by the French failed
to break the English line, though the
Highlanders upon Pack's extreme right,
close against Quatre Bras itself, were caught
before they could form square, and the
second phase of the battle ended in a draw.

102 WATERLOO

Ney had missed the opportunity when
the enemy in front of him were in numbers
less than half his own ; he had failed to
pierce their line when reinforcements had
brought up their numbers to a superiority
over his own. He must now set about a
far more serious business, for there was
every prospect, as the afternoon advanced,
that Wellington would be still further
reinforced, while Ney had nothing but his
original 20,000 — half his command ; of
Erlon's coming there was not a sign ! Yet
another hour had been consumed in the
general French advance and its repulse,
which I have just described. It was five
o'clock.

I beg the reader to concentrate his
attention upon this point of the action —
the few minutes before and after the hour
of five. A number of critical things occurred
in that short space of time, all of which
must be kept in mind.

The first was this : A couple of brigades
came in at that moment to reinforce
Wellington. They gave him a 25 per cent,
superiority in men, and an appreciable
superiority in guns as well.

In the second place, Ney was keeping
the action at a standstill, waiting until his
own forces should be doubled by the arrival

THE DECISIVE DAY 103

of Erlon's force. Ney had been fighting all
this while, as I have said, with only half his
command — the Second Army Corps of Reille.
Erlon's First Army Corps formed the second
half, and when it came up — as Ney con-
fidently expected it to do immediately — it
would double his numbers, and raise them
from 20,000 to 40,000 men. With this
superiority he could be sure of success, even
if, as was probable, further reinforcements
should reach the enemy's line. It is to be
noted that it was due to Ney's own tardi-
ness in giving orders that Erlon was
coming up so late, but by now, five o'clock,
the head of his columns might at any
moment be seen debouching from Frasnes.

In the third place, while Ney was thus
anxiously waiting for Erlon, and seeing the
forces in front of him swelling to be more
and more superior to his own, there came
yet another message from Napoleon telling
Ney how matters stood in the great action
that was proceeding five miles away, urging
him again with the utmost energy to have
done at Quatre Bras, to come back over
eastward upon the flank of the Prussians
at Ligny, and so to destroy their army
utterly and " to save France."

To have done with the action of Quatre
Bras ! But there were already superior

104 WATERLOO

forces before Ney ! And they were in-
creasing ! If he dreamt of turning, it
would be annihilation for his troops, or at
the least the catching of his army's and
Napoleon's between two fires. He might
just manage when Erlon came up — and
surely Erlon must appear from one moment
to another — he might just manage to over-
throw the enemy in front of him so rapidly
as to have time to turn and appear at
Ligny before darkness should fall, from
three to four hours later.

It all hung on Erlon : — He might I and at
that precise moment, with his impatience
strained to breaking-point, and all his ex-
pectation turned on Frasnes, whence the
head of Erlon' s column should appear, there
rode up to Ney a general officer, Delcambre
by name. He came with a message. It was
from Erlon. . . . Erlon had abandoned the
road to Quatre Bras ; had understood that
he was not to join Ney after all, but to go
east and help Napoleon ! He had turned off
eastward to the right two and a half miles
back, and was by this time far off in the
direction which would lead him to take
part in the battle of Ligny !

Under the staggering blow of this news
Ney broke into a fury. It meant possibly
the annihilation of his body, certainly its

THE DECISIVE DAY 105

defeat. He did two things, both unwise
from the point of view of his own battle,
and one fatal from the point of view of
the whole campaign.

First, he launched his reserve cavalry,
grossly insufficient in numbers for such a
mad attempt, right at the English line, in
a despairing effort to pierce such superior
numbers by one desperate charge. Secondly,
he sent Delcambre back — not calculating
distance or time — with peremptory orders
to Erlon, as his subordinate, to come back
at once to the battlefield of Quatre Bras.

There was, as commander to lead that
cavalry charge, Kellerman. He had but
one brigade of cuirassiers : two regiments
of horse against 25,000 men ! It was an
amazing ride, but it could accomplish
nothing of purport. It thundered down
the slope, breaking through the advancing
English troops (confused by a mistaken
order, and not yet formed in square), cut to
pieces the gunners of a battery, broke a
regiment of Brunswickers near the top of
the hill, and reached at last the cross-roads
of Quatre Bras. Five hundred men still
sat their horses as the summit of the slope
was reached. The brigade had cut a lane
right through the mass of the defence ; it
had not pierced it altogether.

106 WATERLOO

Some have imagined that if at that
moment the cavalry of the Guard, which
was still in reserve, had followed this first
charge by a second, Ney might have effected
his object and broken Wellington's line. It
is extremely doubtful, the numbers were
so wholly out of proportion to such a task.
At any rate, the order for the second charge,
when it came, came somewhat late. The
five hundred as they reined up on the sum-
mit of the hill were met and broken by
a furious cross-fire from the Namur road
upon the right, from the head of Bossu
Wood upon the left, while yet another
unit, come up in this long succession to
reinforce the defence — a battery of the
King's German Legion — opened upon
them with grape. The poor remnant of
Kellerman's Horse turned and galloped
back in confusion.

The second cavalry charge attempted by
the French reserve, coming just too late,
necessarily failed, and at the same moment
yet another reinforcement — the first British
division of the Guards, and a body of Nas-
sauers, with a number of guns — came up to
increase the now overwhelming superiority
of Wellington's line.1

1 This first division of the Guards consisted of the
two brigades of Maitland and of Byng.

THE DECISIVE DAY 107

There was even an attempt at advance
upon the part of Wellington.

As the evening turned to sunset, and the
sunset to night, that advance was made
very slowly and with increasing difficulty
— and all the while Ney's embarrassed
force, now confronted by something like
double its own numbers, and contesting
the ground yard by yard as it yielded,
received no word of Erlon.

The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by
the right wing of Wellington's army, rein-
forced by the newly arrived Guards, took
more than an hour. It took as long to
push the French centre back to Gemion-
court, and all through the last of the sun-
light the walls of the farm were desperately
held. On the left, Pierrepont was simi-
larly held for close upon an hour. The
sun had already set when the Guards
debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only
to be met and checked by a violent artillery
fire from Pierrepont, while at the same time
the remnant of the cuirassiers charged again,
and broke a Belgian battalion at the edge
of the wood.

By nine o'clock it was dark and the
action ceased. Just as it ceased, and while,
in the last glimmerings of the light, the
major objects of the landscape, groups of

108 WATERLOO

wood and distant villages, could still be
faintly distinguished against the back-
ground of the gloom, one such object
seemed slowly to approach and move. It
was first guessed and then perceived to be
a body of men : the head of a column
began to debouch from Frasnes. It was
Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour
too late.

All that critical day had passed with the
First Corps out of action. It had neither
come up to Napoleon to wipe out the
Prussians at Ligny, nor come back in its
countermarch in time to save Ney and
drive back Wellington at Quatre Bras. It
might as well not have existed so far as
the fortunes of the French were concerned,
and its absence from either field upon that
day made defeat certain in the future, as
the rest of these pages will show.

Two things impress themselves upon us
as we consider the total result of that
critical day, the 16th of June, which saw
Ney fail to hold the Brussels road at
Quatre Bras, and there to push away from
the advance on Brussels Wellington's
opposing force, and which also saw the
successful escape of the Prussians from

Tjienv. ?

THE DECISIVE DAY

109

Ligny, an escape which was to permit
them to join Wellington forty-eight hours
later and to decide Waterloo.

The first is the capital importance, dis-

THE ELEMENTS

OF
QUATRE BRAS.

astrous to the French fortunes, of Erlon's
having been kept out of both fights by
his useless march and countermarch.

The second is the extraordinary way in
which Wellington's command came up
haphazard, dribbling in by units all day

110 WATERLOO

long, and how that command owed to
Ney's caution and tardiness, much more
than to its own General's arrangements,
the superiority in numbers which it began
to enjoy from an early phase in the
battle.

I will deal with these two points in their
order.

As to the first : —

The whole of the four days of 1815, and
the issue of Waterloo itself, turned upon
Erlon's disastrous counter-marching be-
tween Quatre Bras and Ligny upon this
Friday, the 16th of June, which was the
decisive day of the war.

What actually happened has been suffi-
ciently described. The useless advance of
Erlon's corps d'armee towards Napoleon
and the right — useless because it was not
completed ; the useless turning back of
that corps d'armee towards Ney and the
left — useless because it could not reach
Ney in time, — these were the determining
factors of that critical moment in the
campaign.

In other words, Erlon's zigzag kept the
20,000 of the First Corps out of action all
day. Had they been with Ney, the Allies

THE DECISIVE DAY 111

under Wellington at Quatre Bras would
have suffered a disaster. Had they been
with Napoleon, the Prussians at Ligny
would have been destroyed. As it was, the
First Army Corps managed to appear on
neither field. Wellington more than held
his own ; the Prussians at Ligny escaped,
to fight two days later at Waterloo.

Such are the facts, and they explain all
that followed (see Map, next page).

But it has rightly proved of considerable
interest to historians to attempt to dis-
cover the human motives and the personal
accidents of temperament and misunder-
standing which led to so extraordinary a
blunder as the utter waste of a whole army
corps during a whole day, within an area
not five miles by four.

It is for the purpose of considering these
human motives and personal accidents that
I offer these pages ; for if we can compre-
hend Erlon's error, we shall fill the only
remaining historical gap in the story of
Waterloo, and determine the true causes
of that action's result.

There are two ways of appreciating
historical evidence. The first is the law-
yer's way : to establish the pieces of evi-
dence as a series of disconnected units, to
docket them, and then to see that they

112

WATERLOO

are mechanically pieced together ; admit-
ting, the while, only such evidence as would

tiQn in which
completeness
ir defeat at

permitted the
to retreat •

hus later effect

junction with

ngton

Erlon and 1st Army Corps :
(0 About noon
(a) Late afternoon
(3) Nightfall

Sambre River Obstacle Crossed at Ch

French- A.Ney, B. Napoleo
i Prussians
Wellington

Scale of English miles

pass the strict and fossil rules of our par-
ticular procedure in the courts. This way,
as might be inferred from its forensic origin,
is particularly adapted to arriving at a

THE DECISIVE DAY 113

foregone conclusion. It is useless or worse
in an attempt to establish a doubtful truth.

The second way is that by which we
continually judge all real evidence upon
matters that are of importance to us in
our ordinary lives : the way in which we
invest money, defend our reputation, and
judge of personal risk or personal advantage
in every grave case.

This fashion consists in admitting every
kind of evidence, first hand, second hand,
third hand, documentary, verbal, traditional ,
and judging the general effect of the whole,
not according to set legal categories, but
according to our general experience of life,
and in particular of human psychology.
We chiefly depend upon the way in which
we know that men conduct themselves
under the influence of such and such
emotions, of the kind of truth and untruth
which we know they will tell ; and to this
we add a consideration of physical cir-
cumstance, of the laws of nature, and hence
of the degrees of probability attaching to
the events which all this mass of evidence
relates.

It is only by this second method, which
is the method of common-sense, that any-
thing can be made of a doubtful historical
point. The legal method would make of

8

114 WATERLOO

history what it makes of justice. Which
God forbid !

Historical points are doubtful precisely
because there is conflict of evidence ; and
conflict of evidence is only properly resolved
by a consideration of the psychology of
witnesses, coupled with a consideration of
the physical circumstances which limited
the matter of their testimony.

Judged by these standards, the fatal
march and countermarch of Erlon become
plain enough.

His failure to help either Ney or Napoleon
was not treason, simply because the man
was not a traitor. It proceeded solely
from obedience to orders ; but these orders
were fatal because Ney made an error of
judgment both as to the real state of the
double struggle — Quatre Bras, Ligny — and
as to the time required for the counter-
march. This I shall now show.

Briefly, then : —

Erlon, as he was leading his army corps
up to help Ney, his immediate superior,
turned it off the road before he reached Ney
and led it away towards Napoleon.

Why did he do this ?

It was because he had received, not
indeed from his immediate superior, Ney
himself, but through a command of Napoleon's,

THE DECISIVE DAY 115

which he knew to be addressed to Ney, the
order to do so.

When Erlon had almost reached Napoleon
he turned his army corps right about face
and led it off back again towards Ney.

Why did he do that ?

It was because he had received at that
moment a further peremptory order from Ney,
his direct superior, to act in this fashion.

Such is the simple and common-sense
explanation of the motives under which
this fatal move and countermove, with its
futile going and coming, with its apparent
indecision, with its real strictness of military
discipline, was conducted. As far as Erlon
is concerned, it was no more than the
continual obedience of orders, or supposed
orders, to which a soldier is bound. With
Ney's responsibility I shall deal in a moment.

Let me first make the matter plainer, if I
can, by an illustration.

Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer's
house and at the same time in a barn half
a mile away. The farmer sends ten men
with water-buckets and an engine to put
out the fire at the barn, while he himself,
with another ten men, but without an
engine, attends to the rick. He gives to
his foreman, who is looking after the barn
fire, the task of giving orders to the engine,

116 WATERLOO

and the man at the engine is told to look
to the foreman and no one else for his orders.
The foreman is known to be of the greatest
authority with his master. Hardly has
the farmer given all these instructions when
he finds that the fire in the rick has spread
to his house. He lets the barn go hang, and
sends a messenger to the foreman with an
urgent note to send back the engine at once
to the house and rick. The messenger finds
the man with the engine on his way to the
barn, intercepts him, and tells him that the
farmer has sent orders to the foreman that
the engine is to go back at once to the
house. The fellow turns round with his
engine and is making his way towards the
house when another messenger comes post-
haste from the foreman direct, telling him at
all costs to bring the engine back to the
barn. The man with the engine turns
once more, abandons the house, but
cannot reach the barn in time to save it.
The result of the shilly-shally is that the
barn is burnt down, and the fire at the
farmer's house only put out after it has
done grave damage.

The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and
house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney,
and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man
with the engine is Erlon, and the engine

THE DECISIVE DAY 117

is Erlon's command — the First Corps
d'Armee.

There was no question of contradictory
orders in Erlon's mind, as many historians
seem to imagine ; there was simply, from
Erlon's standpoint, a countermanded order.

He had received, indeed, an order coming
from the Emperor, but he had received it
only as the subordinate of Ney, and only,
as he presumed, with Ney's knowledge and
consent, either given or about to be given.
In the midst of executing this order, he
got another order countermanding it, and
proceeding directly from his direct superior.
He obeyed this second order as exactly as
he had obeyed the first.

Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation
of the thing, and Ney's is the mind, the
person, historically responsible for the
whole business.

Let us consider the difficulties in the way
of accepting this conclusion. The first
difficulty is that Ney would not have taken
it upon himself to countermand an order
of Napoleon's. Those who argue thus
neither know the character of Ney nor the
nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras ; and
they certainly underestimate both the con-
fusion and the elasticity of warfare. Ney,
a man of violent temperament (as, indeed,

118 WATERLOO

one might expect with such courage), was
in the heat of the desperate struggle at
Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon's
order to abandon his own business (a course
which was, so late in the action, physically
impossible). Almost at the same moment
Ney heard most tardily from a messen-
ger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel
Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000
men — Erlon, who had distinctly been placed
under his orders — was gone off at a tangent,
and was leaving him with a grossly insuffi-
cient force to meet the rapidly swelling
numbers of Wellington. We have ample
evidence of the rage into which he flew,
and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre
with the absolutely positive order to Erlon
that he should turn round and come back
to Quatre Bras.

Of course, if war were clockwork, if
there were no human character in a
commander, if no latitude of judgment
were understood in the very nature of a
great independent command such as Ney's
was upon that day, if there were always
present before every independent com-
mander's mental vision an exact map of
the operations, and, at the same time, a plan
of the exact position of all the troops upon
it at any given moment — if all these arm-

THE DECISIVE DAY 119

chair conceptions of war were true, then
Ney's order would have been as undisci-
plined in character and as foolish in intention
as it was disastrous in effect.

But such conceptions are not true.
Great generals entrusted with separate
forces, and told off to engage in a great
action at a distance from the supreme
command, have, by the very nature of their
mission, the widest latitude of judgment
left to them. They are perfectly free to
decide, in some desperate circumstance,
that if their superior knew of that circum-
stance, he would understand why an after-
order of his was not obeyed, or was even
directly countermanded. That Ney should
have sent this furious counterorder, there-
fore, to Erlon, telling him to come back
instantly, in spite of Napoleon's first note,
though it was a grievous error, is one
perfectly explicable, and parallel to many
other similar incidents that diversify the
history of war. In effect, Ney said to
himself : " The Emperor has no idea of the
grave crisis at my end of the struggle or he
wouldn't have sent that order. He is
winning, anyhow ; I am actually in danger
of defeat ; and if I am defeated, Wellington's
troops will pour through and come up on
the Emperor's army from the rear and

120 WATERLOO

destroy it. I have a right, therefore, to sum-
mon Erlon back." Such was the rationale
of Ney's decision. His passionate mood
did the rest.

A second and graver difficulty is this :
By the time Erlon got the message to come
back, it was so late that he could not
possibly bring his 20,000 up in time to be
of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They
could only arrive on the field, as they did
in fact arrive, when darkness had already
set in. It is argued that a general in Ney's
position would have rapidly calculated the
distance involved, and would have seen
that it was useless to send for his subordinate
at such an hour.

The answer to this suggestion is twofold.
In the first place, a man under hot fire is
capable of making mistakes ; and Ney was,
at the moment when he gave that order,
under the hottest fire of the whole action.
In the second place, he could not have any
very exact idea of where in all those four
miles of open fields behind him the head
of Erlon' s column might be, still less where
exactly Delcambre would find it by the
time he had ridden back. A mile either way
would have made all the difference ; if
Erlon was anywhere fairly close ; if Del-
cambre knew exactly where to find him,

THE DECISIVE DAY 121

and galloped by the shortest route — if this
and if that, it might still be that Erlon
would turn up just before darkness and
decide the field in Ney's favour.1

Considerable discussion has turned on
whether, as the best authorities believe,
Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled
note written personally to him by the
Emperor, telling him to turn at once and
come to his, Napoleon's, aid, and by his
unexpected advent upon its flank destroy
the Prussian army.

As an explanation of the false move of
Erlon back and forth, the existence of this
note is immaterial. The weight of evidence
is in its favour, and men will believe or
disbelieve it according to the way in which
they judge human character and motive.
For the purposes of a dramatic story the
incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is
very valuable, but as an elucidation of the
historical problem it has no importance,
for, even if he got such a note, Erlon only
got it in connection with general orders,
which, he knew, were on their way to Ney,
his superior.

1 Let it be remembered, for instance, that Ziethen's
corps, which helped to turn the scale at Waterloo, two
days later, only arrived on the field of battle less than
half an hour before sunset.

122 WATERLOO

The point for military history is that —

(a) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his
way up to Quatre Bras that afternoon,
was intercepted by a messenger, who told
him that the Emperor wanted him to turn
off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to
Quatre Bras; while —

(6) He also knew that that message was
intended also to be delivered, and either
had been or was about to be delivered,
to his superior officer, Ney. Therefore he
went eastward as he had been told, believing
that Ney knew all about it ; and therefore,
also, on receiving a further direct order
from Ney to turn back again westward, he
did turn back.

If we proceed to apportion the blame for
that disastrous episode, which, by per-
mitting Blucher to escape, was the plain
cause of Napoleon's subsequent defeat at
Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must
fall upon Ney, who could not believe, in
the heat of the violent action in which he
was involved, that Napoleon's contemporary
action against Ligny could be more decisive
or more important than his own. It was
a question of exercising judgment, and of
deciding whether Napoleon had justly
judged the proportion between his chances
of a great victory and Ney's chances ; and

THE DECISIVE DAY 123

further, whether a great victory at Ligny
would have been of more effect than a
great victory or the prevention of a bad
defeat at Quatre Bras. Napoleon was right
and Ney was wrong.

I have heard or read the further sugges-
tion that Napoleon, on seeing Erlon, or
having him reported, not two miles away,
should have sent him further peremptory
orders to continue his march and to come
on to Ligny.

This is bad history. Erlon, as it was,
was heading a trifle too much to the south,
so that Napoleon, who thought the whole
of Ney's command to be somewhat further
up the Brussels road northward than it was,
did not guess at first what the new troops
coming up might be, and even feared they
might be a detachment of Wellington's,
who might have defeated Ney, and now be
coming in from the west to attack him.

He sent an orderly to find out what
the newcomers were. The orderly returned
to report that the troops were Erlon' s, but
that they had turned back. Had Napoleon
sent again, after this, to find Erlon, and to
make him for a third time change his direc-
tion, it would have been altogether too late
to have used Erlon' s corps d'armee at
Ligny by the time it should have come up.

124 WATERLOO

Napoleon had, therefore, no course before
him but to do as he did, namely, give up all
hope of help from the west, and defeat the
Prussians at Ligny before him, if not de-
cisively, at least to the best of his ability,
with the troops immediately to his hand.

So much for Erlon.

Now for the second point : the way in
which the units of Wellington's forces
dribbled in all day haphazard upon the
position of Quatre Bras.

Wellington, as we saw on an earlier page,
was both misinformed and confused as to
the nature and rapidity of the French
advance into Belgium. He did not appreci-
ate, until too late, the importance of the
position of Quatre Bras, nor the intention
of the French to march along the great
northern road. Even upon the field of
Waterloo itself he was haunted by the odd
misconception that Napoleon's army would
try and get across his communications with
the sea, and he left, while Waterloo was
actually being fought, a considerable force
useless, far off upon his right, on that same
account.

The extent of Wellington's misjudgment
we can easily perceive and understand.

THE DECISIVE DAY 125

Every general must, in the nature of war,
misjudge to some extent the nature of his
opponent's movements, but the shocking
errors into which bad staff work led him
in this his last campaign are quite ex-
ceptional.

Wellington wrote to Blucher, on his
arrival at the field of Quatre Bras, at
about half-past ten in the morning, a note
which distinctly left Blucher to under-
stand that he might expect English aid
during his forthcoming battle with Napo-
leon at Ligny. He did not say so in so
many words, but he said : " My forces are
at such and such places," equivalent, that
is, to saying, " My forces can come up quite
easily, for they are close by you," adding :
" I do not see any large force of the enemy
in front of us ; and I await news from your
Highness, and the arrival of troops, in
order to determine my operations for the
day."

In this letter, moreover, he said in so
many words that his reserve, the large
body upon which he mainly depended,
would be within three miles of him by
noon, the British cavalry within seven
miles of him at the same hour.

Then he rode over to see Blucher on the
field of Ligny before Napoleon's attack on

126 WATERLOO

that general had begun. He got there at
about one o'clock.

An acrimonious discussion has arisen as
to whether he promised to come up and
help Blucher shortly afterwards or not, but
it is a discussion beside the mark, for, in the
first place, Wellington quite certainly in-
tended to come up and help the Prussians ;
and in the second place, he was quite as
certainly unable to do so, for the French
opposition under Ney which he had
under-estimated, turned out to be a serious
thing.

But his letter, and his undoubted
intention to come up and help Blucher,
depended upon his belief that the units
of his army were all fairly close, and that
by, say, half-past one he would have the
whole lot occupying the heights of Quatre
Bras.

Now, as a fact, the units of Wellington's
command were scattered all over the place,
and it is astonishing to note the discrepancy
between his idea of their position and their
real position on the morning of the day
when Quatre Bras was fought. When one
appreciates what that discrepancy was, one
has a measure of the bad staff work that
was being done under Wellington at the
moment.

I

^>iJ

128 WATERLOO

The plan (p. 127) x distinguishes between
the real positions of Wellington's command
on the morning of the 16th when he was
writing his letter to Blucher and the posi-
tions which Wellington, in that letter,
erroneously ascribes to them. It will show
the reader the wide difference there was
between Wellington's idea of where his
troops were and their actual position on
that morning. It needs no comment. It
is sufficient in itself to explain why the
action at Quatre Bras consisted not in a
set army meeting and repelling the French
(it could have destroyed them as things
turned out, seeing Erlon's absence), but in
the perpetual arrival of separate and hurried
units, which went on from midday almost
until nightfall.

1 I have in this map numbered separate corps and
units from one to ten, without giving them names.
The units include the English cavalry and Dornberg's
brigade, with the Cumberland Hussars, the First, Second,
Third, and Fifth Infantry Divisions, the corps of Bruns-
wick, the Nassauers, and the Second and Third Nether-
lands Divisions. All of these ultimately reached Quatre
Bras with the exception of the Second Infantry Division.

IV

THE ALLIED RETREAT AND
FRENCH ADVANCE UPON
WATERLOO AND WAVRE

WHEN the Prussians had concentrated to
meet Napoleon at Ligny they had managed
to collect, in time for the battle, three out
of their four army corps.

These three army corps were the First,
the Second, and the Third, and, as we have
just seen, they were defeated.

But, as we have also seen, they were not
thoroughly defeated. They were not dis-
organised, still less were the bulk of them
captured and disarmed. Most important
of all, they were free to retreat by any road
that did not bring them against their vic-
torious enemy. In other words, they were
free to retreat to the north as well as to the
east.

The full importance of this choice will,
after the constant reiteration of it in the
preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A
retreat towards the east, and upon the line

129 9

130 WATERLOO

of communications which fed the Prussian
army, would have had these two effects :
First, it would have involved in the retire-
ment that fresh Fourth Army Corps under
Bulow which had not yet come into action,
and which numbered no less than 32,000
men. For it lay to the east of the battle-
field. In other words, that army corps
would have been wasted, and the whole
of the Prussian forces would have been
forced out of the remainder of the cam-
paign. Secondly, it would have finally
separated Blucher and his Prussians from
Wellington's command. The Duke, with
his western half of the allied forces, would
have had to stand up alone to the mass of
Napoleon's army, which would, after the
defeat of the Prussians at Ligny, naturally
turn to the task of defeating the English
General.

Now the fact of capital importance upon
which the reader must concentrate if he is
to grasp the issue of the campaign is the
fact that the French staff fell into an error
as to the true direction of the Prussian
retreat.

Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of
the French army were convinced that the
Prussian retreat was being made by that
easterner oad.

.

ALLIED RETREAT 131

As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover
of darkness, had retired not east but north.

The defeated army corps, the First,
Second, and Third, did not fall back upon
the fresh and unused Fourth Corps ; they
left it unhampered to march northward
also ; and all during the darkness the
Prussian forces, as a whole, were marching
in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre
and its neighbourhood.

It was this escape to the north instead
of the east that made it possible for the
Prussians to effect their junction with
Wellington upon the day of Waterloo ;
but it must not be imagined that this
supremely fortunate decision to abandon
the field of their defeat at Ligny in a
northerly rather than an easterly direction
was at first deliberately conceived by the
Prussians with the particular object of
effecting a junction with Wellington later
on.

In the first place, the Prussians had no
idea what line Wellington's retreat would
take. They knew that he was particularly
anxious about his communications with the
sea, and quite as likely to move westward
as northward when Napoleon should come
against him.

The full historical truth, accurately stated,

132 WATERLOO

cannot be put into the formula, " The
Prussians retreated northward in order to
be able to join Wellington two days later
at Waterloo." To state it so would be to
read history backwards, and to presuppose
in the Prussian staff a knowledge of the
future. The true formula is rather as
follows : — " The Prussians retired north-
ward, and not eastward, because the in-
completeness of their defeat permitted
them to do so, and thus at once to avoid
the waste of their Fourth Army Corps and
to gain positions where they would be able,
if necessity arose, to get news of what had
happened to Wellington."

In other words, to retreat northwards,
though the decision to do so depended only
upon considerations of the most general
kind, was wise strategy, and the opportunity
for that piece of strategy was seized ; but
the retreat northwards was not undertaken
with the specific object of at once rejoining
Wellington.

It must further be pointed out that this
retreat northwards, though it abandoned
the fixed line of communications leading
through Namur and Liege to Aix la Chapelle,
would pick up in a very few miles another
line of communications through Louvain,
Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian

ALLIED RETREAT 133

commanders, in determining upon this
northward march, were in no way risking
their supply nor hazarding the existence
of their army upon a great chance. They
were taking advantage of one of two
courses left open to them, and that one the
wiser of the two.

This retreat upon Wavre was conducted
with a precision and an endurance most
remarkable when we consider the fact that
it took place just after a severe, though not
a decisive, defeat.

Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians en-
gaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had fallen,
killed or wounded. When the Prussian
centre broke, many units became totally
disorganised ; and, counting the prisoners
and runaways who failed to rejoin the
colours, we must accept as certainly not
exaggerated the Prussian official report of
a loss of 15,000.!

In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the
order of the retreat was well maintained,
and was rewarded by an exceptional
rapidity.

The First Corps marched along the west-
erly route that lay directly before them by

1 In which 15,000, as accurate statistics are totally
lacking, and the whole thing is a matter of rough
estimate, we may assign what proportion we will to
killed, to wounded, and to prisoners respectively.

134 WATERLOO

Tilly and Mont St Guibert. They marched
past Wavre itself, and bivouacked about
midday of Saturday the 17th, round about
the village of Bierges, on the other side of
the river Dyle.

The Second Corps followed the First,
and ended its march on the southern side
of Wavre, round about the village of St
Anne.

The Third Corps did not complete the
retreat until the end of daylight upon the
17th, and then marched through Wavre,
across the river to the north, and bivouacked
around La Bavette.

Finally, still later on the same evening,
the Fourth Corps, that of Bulow, which
had come to Ligny too late for the action,
marching by the eastward lanes, through
Sart and Corry, lay round Dion Le Mont.

By nightfall, therefore, on Saturday the
17th of June, we have the mass of the
Prussian army safe round Wavre, and duly
disposed all round that town in perfect
order.

With the exception of a rearguard,
which did not come up until the morning
of the Sunday, all had been safely with-
drawn in the twenty-four hours that
followed the defeat at Ligny.

It may be asked why this great move-

136 WATERLOO

ment had been permitted to take place
without molestation from the victors.

Napoleon would naturally, of course,
after his defeat of the Prussians, withdraw
to the west the greater part of the forces
he had used against Blucher at Ligny and
direct them towards the Brussels road in
order to use them next against Wellington.
But Napoleon had left behind him Grouchy
in supreme command over a great body of
troops, some 33,000 in all, whose business it
was to follow up the Prussians, to find out
what road they had taken ; at the least to
watch their movements, and at the best to
cut off any isolated bodies or to give battle
to any disjointed parts which the retreat
might have separated from support. In
general, Grouchy was to see to it that the
Prussians did not return.

In this task Grouchy failed. True, he
was not given his final instructions by the
Emperor until nearly midday of the 17th,
but a man up to his work would have dis-
covered the line of the Prussian retreat and
have hung on to it. Grouchy failed, partly
because he was insufficiently provided with
cavalry, partly because he was a man
excellent only in a sudden tactical dilemma,
incompetent in large strategical problems,
partly because he mistrusted his subor-

ALLIED RETREAT 137

dinates, and they him ; but most of all
because of an original prepossession (under
which, it is but fair to him to add, all the
French leaders lay) that the Prussian
retreat had taken the form of a flight
towards Namur, along the eastern line of
communications, while, as a fact, it had
taken the form of a disciplined retreat
upon Wavre and the north.

At ten o'clock in the evening of Saturday
the 17th, twenty-four hours after the battle
of Ligny, and at the moment when the
whole body of the Prussian forces was
already reunited in an orderly circle round
Wavre, Grouchy, twelve miles to the south
of them, was beginning — but only beginning
— to discover the truth. He wrote at that
hour to the Emperor that "the Prussians
had retired in several directions," one body
towards Namur, another with Blucher
the Commander-in-chief towards Liege, and
a third body apparently towards Wavre. He
even added that he was going to find out
whether it might not be the larger of the
three bodies which had gone towards Wavre,
and he appreciated that whoever had gone
towards Wavre intended keeping in touch
with the rest of the Allies under Wellington.
But all that Grouchy did after writing this
letter proves how little he, as yet, really

138 WATERLOO

believed that any great body of the enemy
had marched on Wavre. He anxiously
sent out, not northward, but eastward and
north-eastward, to feel for what he believed
to be the main body of the retreating foe.

During the night he did become finally
convinced by the mass of evidence brought
in by his scouts that round Wavre was the
whole Prussian force, and the conclusion
that he came to was singular ! He took
it for granted that through Wavre the
Prussians certainly intended a full retreat on
Brussels. He wrote at daybreak of the 1 8th
of June that he was about to pursue them.

That Blucher could dream of taking a
short cut westward, thus effecting an im-
mediate junction with Wellington, never
entered Grouchy's head. He did not put
his army in motion until after having written
this letter. He advanced his troops in a
decent and leisurely manner up the Wavre
road through the mid hours of the day, and
himself, just before noon, wrote a dispatch
to the Emperor ; he wrote it from Sart,
a point ten miles south of Wavre. In that
letter he announced " his intention to be
massed at Wavre that night" and begging
for " orders as to how he should begin his
attack of the next day"

The next day ! Monday !

ALLIED RETREAT 139

Already, hours before — by midnight of
Saturday — Blucher had sent his message to
Wellington assuring him that the Prussians
would come to his assistance upon Sunday,
the morrow.

Even as Grouchy was writing, the Prus-
sian Corps were streaming westward across
country to appear upon Napoleon's flank
four hours later and decide the campaign.

Having written his letter, Grouchy sat
down to lunch. As he sat there at meat,
far off, the first shots of the battle of
Waterloo were fired.

So far, we have followed the retreat of
the Prussians northwards from their defeat
at Ligny. With the exception of the
rearguard, they were all disposed by the
evening of Saturday the 17th in an orderly
fashion round the little town of Wavre.
We have also followed the methodical
but tardy and ill-conceived pursuit in which
Grouchy felt out with his cavalry to discover
the line of the Prussian retreat, and con-
tinued to be in doubt of its nature at least
until midnight, and probably until even
later than midnight, in that night between
Saturday the 17th, evening, and Sunday the
18th of June.

140 WATERLOO

We have further seen that during the
morning of Sunday the 18th of June he
was taking no dispositions for a rapid
pursuit, but, being now convinced that the
Prussians merely intended a general retreat
upon Brussels, proposed to follow them in
order to watch that retreat, and, if possible,
to shepherd them eastwards. He wrote,
as we have just said, to the Emperor in the
course of that morning of the Sunday,
announcing that he meant to mass his troops
at Wavre by nightfall, and asking for orders
for the next day.

What the Prussians were doing during
that Sunday morning when Grouchy was so
quietly and soberly taking for granted that
they could not or would not rejoin Welling-
ton, and was so quietly shielding his own
responsibility behind the Emperor's orders,
we shall see when we come to talk of the
action itself — the battle of Waterloo.

Meanwhile we must return to the second
half of the great strategic move, and watch
the retreat of the Duke of Wellington
during that same Saturday, and the stand
which he made on the ridge called " the
Mont St Jean " by the nightfall of that day,
in order to accept battle on the Sunday
morning.

An observer watching the whole business

ALLIED RETREAT 141

of that Saturday from some height in the
air above the valley of the Sambre, and
looking northwards, would have seen on
the landscape below, to his right, the Prus-
sians streaming in great parallel columns
upon Wavre from the battlefield of Ligny.
He would have seen, scattered upon the
roads, small groups of mounted men, here
in touch with the last files of a Prussian
column, there lost and wandering forward
into empty spaces where no soldiers were.
These were the cavalry scouts of Grouchy.
South of these, and far behind the Prussian
rear, separated from them by a gap of ten
miles, a dense body of infantry, drawn up
in heavy columns of route, was the corps
commanded by Grouchy.

What would such an observer have seen
upon the landscape below and before him
to his left ? He would have seen an in-
terminable line of men streaming north-
ward also, all afternoon, up the Brussels
road from Quatre Bras ; and behind them,
treading upon their heels, another column,
miles in length, pressing the pursuit. The
retreating column, as it hurried off, he would
see screened on its rear by a mass of cavalry,
that from time to time charged and checked
the pursuers, and sometimes put guns in
line to hold them back. The pursuers, after

142 WATERLOO

each such check, would still press on. The
first, the thousands in retreat, were Welling-
ton's command retiring from Quatre Bras ;
the second, the pursuers, were a body some
74,000 strong formed by the junction of
Ney and Napoleon, and pressing forward
to bring Wellington to battle.

At Quatre Bras, Wellington had not been
able, as he had hoped, to join the Prussians
and save them from defeat. The French,
under Ney, had held him up. He would
even have suffered a reverse had Ney
attacked promptly and strongly earlier in
the day of Friday the 16th, but Ney had
not acted promptly and strongly.

All day long reinforcements had come
in one after the other, much later than the
Duke intended, but in a sufficient measure
to meet the tardy and too cautious develop-
ment of Ney's attack. Finally, the real
peril under which the Duke lay (though he
did not know it) — the junction of Erlon and
his forces with Ney — had not taken place
until darkness fell, and Erlon 's 20,000 had
been wasted in the futile fashion which has
been described and analysed.

The upshot, therefore, of the whole
business at Quatre Bras was, that during

ALLIED RETREAT 143

the night between Friday and Saturday
the 16th and the 17th the English and the
French lay upon their positions, neither
seriously incommoding the other.

During that night further reinforcements
reached Wellington where his troops had
bivouacked upon the positions they had
held so well. Lord Uxbridge, in command
of the British cavalry, and Ompteda's
brigade both came up with the morning,
as did also Clinton's division and Colville's
division, and so did the reserve artillery.

In spite of all these reinforcements, in
spite even of the great mass of horse which
Uxbridge had brought up, and of the new
guns, Wellington's position upon that morn-
ing of Saturday the 17th of June was,
though he did not yet know it, very perilous.

He still believed that the Prussians were
holding on to Ligny, and that they had
kept their positions during the night, which
night he had himself spent at Genappe, to
the rear of the battlefield of Quatre Bras.1

When Wellington awoke on the morning
of Saturday in Genappe, there were rumours

1 The reason he was thus ignorant of what had really
happened to the Prussians was, that the officer who had
been sent by the chief of the Prussian staff to the Duke
after nightfall to inform him of the Prussian defeat
had never arrived. That officer had been severely
wounded on the way, and the message was not delivered.

144 WATERLOO

in the place that the Prussians had been
defeated the day before at Ligny. The
Duke went at once to Quatre Bras ; sent
Colonel Gordon off eastward with a detach-
ment of the Tenth Hussars to find out what
had happened, and that officer, finding the
road from Ligny in the hands of the French,
had the sense to scout up northwards, came
upon the tail of the Prussian retreat, and
returned to Wellington at Quatre Bras by
half -past seven with the whole story : the
Prussians had indeed been beaten ; they
were in full retreat ; but a chance of retreat
had lain open towards the north, and that
was the road they had taken.

Wellington knew, therefore, before eight
o'clock on that Saturday morning, that his
whole left or eastern flank was exposed,
and it was common-sense to expect that
Napoleon, with the main body of the French,
having defeated the Prussians at Ligny,
would now march against himself, come
up upon that exposed flank (while Ney
held the front), and so outnumber the Anglo-
Dutch under the Duke's command. At the
worst that command would be destroyed ;
at the best it could only hope, if it gave
time for Napoleon to come up, to have to
retreat westward, and to lose touch, for
good, with the Prussians.

In s

ALLIED RETREAT

145

In such a plight it was Wellington's
business to retreat towards the north, so
as to remain in touch with his Prussian
allies, while yet that line of retreat was

Sketch showing the situation in which Wellington was at
Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th.

open to him, and before Napoleon should
have forced a battle.

The Duke was in no hurry to undertake
this movement, for as yet there was no

10

146 WATERLOO

sign of Napoleon's arrival. The men break-
fasted, and it was not until ten o'clock that
the retreat began. He sent word back up
the road to stop the reinforcements that
were still upon their way to join him at
Quatre Bras, and to turn them round again
up the Brussels road, the way they had
come, until they should reach the ridge of
the Mont St Jean, just in front of the
village of Waterloo, where he had deter-
mined to stand. This done, he made his
dispositions for retirement, and a little
after ten o'clock the retreat upon Waterloo
began. His English infantry led the re-
treat, the Netherland troops following, then
the Brunswickers, and the last files of that
whole great body of men were marching up
the Brussels road northward before noon.
Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very
considerable force of cavalry and the guns
necessary to support it, deployed to cover
the retreat, and watched the enemy.

That enemy was motionless. Ney did
not propose to attack until Napoleon should
come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriv-
ing from the battlefield of Ligny, were not
visible until within the neighbourhood of
two o'clock. As he came near the Emperor
was perceived, his memorable form dis-
tinguished in the midst of a small escorting

ALLIED RETREAT 147

body, urging the march ; and the English
guns, during one of those rare moments
in which war discovers something of drama,
fired upon the man who was the incarna-
tion of all that furious generation of arms.
In a military study, this moment, valuable
to civilian history, may be neglected.

The flood of French troops arriving made
it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of his very
numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to
cover Wellington's retreat.

The task was, however, not only success-
fully but nobly accomplished. Just as the
French came up the sky had darkened and
a furious storm had broken from the north-
west upon the opposing forces. It was in
the midst of a rain so violent that friend
could be hardly distinguished from foe at
thirty yards distance that the pursuit began,
and to the noise of limbers galloped furi-
ously to avoid capture, and of all those
squadrons pursuing and pursued, was joined
an incessant thunder.

Things are accomplished in war which
do not fit into the framework of its largest
stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost.
Overshadowed by the great story of Water-
loo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and
his Horse did on that afternoon of Saturday
the 17th of June is too often forgotten.

148 WATERLOO

The ability and the energy displayed were
equal.

The first deployment to meet the French
advance, the watching of the retirement
of Wellington's main body, the continual
appreciation of ground during a rapid and
dangerous movement and in the worst of
weather, the choice of occasional artillery
positions — all these showed mastery, and
secured the complete order of Wellington's
retreat.1

The pursuit was checked at its most im-
portant point (where the French had to
cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid
deployment of the cavalry upon the slope
beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of
the batteries in retreat, and a double charge,
first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the
First Life Guards.

1 There has arisen a discussion as to the whole nature
of this retreat between the French authorities, who insist
upon the close pursuit by their troops and the precipi-
tate flight of the English rearguard, and the English
authorities, who point out how slight were the losses
of that rearguard, and how just was Wellington's com-
ment that the retreat, as a whole, was unmolested.

This dispute is solved, as are many disputes, by the
consideration that each narrator is right from his point
of view. The French pursuit was most vigorous, the
English rearguard was very hard pressed indeed ; but
that rearguard was so well handled that it continually
held its own, gave back as good as it got, and efficiently
protected the unmolested retreat of the mass of the
army.

FRENCH ADVANCE 149

These charges were successful, they
checked the French, and during the re-
mainder of the afternoon the pursuit to
the north of the Dyle slackened off until,
before darkness, it ceased altogether.

Indeed, there was by that time no
further use in it. The mass of Wellington's
army had reached, and had deployed upon,
that ridge of the Mont St Jean where he
intended to turn and give battle. They
were in a position to receive any immediate
attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit
were at an end.

Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean,
where, at the end of the afternoon and
through the evening, Wellington's troops
were already taking up their positions, was
another ridge, best remembered- by the
name of a farm upon its crest, the " Belle
Alliance." This ridge formed the natural
halting-place of the pursuers. From the
height above Genappe to the ridge of the
Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards ; and if
a further reason be quoted for the cessa-
tion of the pursuit and the ranging into
battle array of either force, the weather
will provide that reason.

The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar
black and consistent sort, almost impass-
able after a drenching rain. The great

150 WATERLOO

paved high road which traverses it was
occupied and encumbered by the wheeled
vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid
advance of infantry bodies thrown out to
the right and left of the road, and so
securing speed by parallel advance, was
made impossible by mud, and the line
grew longer and longer down the main
road, forbidding rapid movement. From
mud, that " fifth element in war " (as
Napoleon himself called it), Wellington's
troops — the mass of them at least — had
been fairly free. They had reached their
positions before the downpour. Only the
cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries
had felt the full force of the storm. Dry
straw of the tall standing crops had been cut
on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the
men of Wellington's command bivouacked
as well as might be under such weather.

With the French it was otherwise.
Their belated units kept straggling in
until long after nightfall. The army was
drawn up only at great expense of time and
floundering effort, mainly in the dark,
drenched, sodden with mud, along the
ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with
difficulty that the wood of the bivouac
fires could be got to burn at all. They
were perpetually going out ; and all that

FRENCH ADVANCE 151

darkness was passed in a misery which the
private soldier must silently expect as part
of his trade, and which is relieved only
by those vague corporate intuitions of a
common peril, and perhaps a common glory,
which, down below all the physical business,
form the soul of an army.

Napoleon, when he had inspected all this
and assured himself that Wellington was
standing ranged upon the opposite ridge,
returned to sleep an hour or two at the
farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the
line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his
quarters in the village of Waterloo, about
a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his
troops upon the Mont St Jean.

In such a disposition the two commanders
and their forces waited for the day.

There must, lastly, be considered, before
the description of action is entered on, the
nature of the field upon which it was about
to be contested. That field had been
studied by Wellington the year before.
He, incomparably the greatest tactical
defensive commander of his time, and one
of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for
its capacities of defence. They were for-
midable. Relying upon them, and confident

152 WATERLOO

of the Prussians coming to his aid when
the battle was joined, he rightly counted
upon success.

Let us begin by noting that of no battle
is it more important to seize the exact
nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground
over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.

To the eye the structure of the battlefield
is simple, consisting essentially of two slight
and rounded ridges, separated by a very
shallow undulation of land.

But this general formation is compli-
cated by certain features which can only be
grasped with the aid of contours, and these
contours, again, are not very easy to follow
at first sight for those who have not seen
the battlefield.

In the map which forms the frontispiece
of this volume, and to which I will beg the
reader to turn, I have indicated the undula-
tions of land in pale green lines underlying
the other features of the battle, which are
in black, red, and blue. The contours are
drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches)
distance ; no contours are given below that
of 100 metres above the sea. The valley
floors below that level are shaded. Up to
the 120-metre line the contours are in-

FRENCH ADVANCE 153

dicated by continuous lines of increasing
thickness. Above the 120-metre line they
are indicated by faint dotted or dashed
lines. I hope in this manner, though the
task is a difficult one, to give a general
impression of the field.

The whole field, both slight ridges and
the intervening depression, lies upon a
large swell of land many square miles in
extent, while it slopes away gradually to the
east on one side and the west on the other.
The highest and hardly distinguishable
knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the
sea. The site of the battle lies actually on
the highest part, the water-parting ; and the
floors of the valleys, down which the streams
run to the east and to the west, are from
150 to 200 feet lower than this confused
lift of land between. To one, however,
standing upon any part of the battlefield,
this feature of height is not very apparent.
True, one sees lower levels falling away left
and right, and the view seems oddly wide,
but the eye gathers the impression of
little more than a rolling plain. This is
because, in comparison with the scale of
the landscape as a whole, the elevations
and depressions are slight.

Upon this rolling mass of high land there
stand out, as I have said, those two slight

154 WATERLOO

ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking,
east and west — perpendicular to the great
Brussels road, which cuts them from south
to north. It was upon this great Brussels
road that both Wellington and Napoleon
took up, at distances less than a mile apart,
their respective centres of position for the
struggle. Though this line of the road did
not precisely bisect the two lines of the
opposing armies, the point where it crossed
each line marked the tactical centre of that
line: both Wellington and Napoleon re-
mained in person upon that road.

Now it must not be imagined that the
shallow depression between the ridges
stretches of even depth between the two
positions taken up by Wellington and
Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle ;
on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to
the west of the road, by a " saddle," a belt
of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as
high as each ridge. The eastern half of
the depression therefore rises continually,
and gets shallower and shallower as it
approaches the road from east westward,
and the road only cuts off the last dip of it.
Then, just west of the road there is the
saddle ; and as you proceed still further
westward along the line midway between
the French and English positions you find

FRENCH ADVANCE

155

a second shallow valley falling away. This
second valley does not precisely continue the
direction of the first, but turns rather more
to the north. In the first slight decline of
this second valley, and a few hundred yards
west of the road, lies the country-house
called Hougomont, and just behind it lay
the western end of Wellington's line. The
whole position, therefore, if it were cut out

as a model in section from a block of wood,
might appear as does the accompanying
plan.

In such a model the northern ridge P — Q
some two miles in length is that held by
Wellington. The southern one M — N is
that held by Napoleon. Napoleon com-
manded from the point A, Wellington from
the point B, and the dark band running
from one to the other represents the great
Brussells High Road. The subsidiary ridge
0 — 0 is that on which Napoleon, as we

156 WATERLOO

shall see, planted his great battery pre-
paratory to the assault. The enclosure H
is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye
Sainte.

Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon
needs less careful study for the compre-
hension of the battle than that held by
Wellington.

The latter is known as the Ridge of the
Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a little
below its highest point and a little behind
its central axis. This ridge Wellington had
carefully studied the year before, and that
great master of defence had noted and
admired the excellence of its defensive
character. Not only does the land rise
towards the ridge through the whole length
of the couple of miles his troops occupied,
not only is it almost free of " dead " 1 ground,
but there lie before it two walled enclosures,
the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large
one of Hougomont, which, properly pre-
pared and loopholed as they were, were
equivalent to a couple of forts standing
out to break the attack. There is, again,
behind the whole line of the ridge, lower

1 " Dead " ground means ground in front of a position
sheltered by its very steepness from the fire of the defence
upon the summit. The ideal front for a defence con-
ducted with firearms is not a very steep slope, but a
long, slight, open and even one.

FRENCH ADVANCE 157

ground upon which the Duke could and did
conceal troops, and along which he could and
did move them safely during the course of
the action.

Anyone acquainted with Wellington's
various actions and their terrains will recog-
nise a common quality in them : they were
all chosen by an eye unequalled for seizing,
even in where an immediate decision was
necessary, all the capabilities of a defensive
position. That taken up on the 18th of
June 1815, in the Duke's last battle, had
been chosen, not under the exigencies of
immediate combat, but with full leisure
and after a complete study. It is little
wonder, then, that it is the best example of
all. Of all the defensive positions which
the genius of Wellington has made famous
in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.

V
THE ACTION

IN approaching this famous action, it is
essential to recapitulate the strategical
conditions which determined its result.

I have mentioned them at the outset and
again in the middle of this study ; I must
repeat them here.

The only chance Napoleon had when he
set forward in early June to attack the allies
in Belgium, the vanguard of his enemies
(who were all Europe), was a chance of
surprising that vanguard, of striking in
suddenly between its two halves, of
thoroughly defeating one or the other,
and then turning to defeat as thoroughly
its colleague.

Other chances than this desperate chance
he had none ; for he was fighting against
odds of very nearly two to one even in his
attack upon this mere vanguard of the
armed kings ; their total forces were, of
course, overwhelmingly superior.

158

THE ACTION 159

He did succeed, as we have seen, in
striking suddenly in between the two halves
of the allied army in Belgium. He was not
as quick as he had intended to be. There
were faults and delays, but he managed,
mainly through the malinformation and
mis judgment of Wellington, to deal with
the Prussians unsupported by Wellington's
western wing.

He attacked those Prussians with the
bulk of his forces ; and although he was
outnumbered even upon that field, he
defeated the Prussians at Ligny. But the
defeat was not complete. The Prussians
were free to retire northward, and so ulti-
mately to rejoin Wellington. They took
that opportunity, and from the moment
they had taken it Napoleon was doomed.

We have further seen that Grouchy, who
had been sent after the Prussian retreat,
might, if he had seen all the possibilities
of that retreat, and had seen them in time,
have stepped in between the Prussians and
Wellington, and have prevented the appear-
ance of the former upon the field of Waterloo.

Had Grouchy done so, Waterloo would
not have been the crushing defeat it was
for Napoleon. It would very probably
have been a tactical success for Napoleon.

But, on the other hand, we have no

160 WATERLOO

ground for thinking that it would have been
a final and determining success for the
Emperor. For if Wellington had not
known quite early in the action that he
could count upon the arrival of the Prus-
sians, he would not have accepted battle.
If, as a fact, he had found the Prussians
intercepted, he could have broken contact
and retreated before it was too late.

Had he done so, it would simply have
meant that he would later have effected a
junction with his allies, and that in the
long-run Napoleon would still have had to
fight an allied army immensely superior
to his own.

All this is as much as to say once more
what has been insisted upon throughout
these pages ; Waterloo was lost, not upon
Sunday, June 18th, but two days before,
when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and
drove back the 80,000 of Blucher but
failed to contain them, failed to drive them
eastward, away from Wellington, or to
cause a general surrender, and failed because
the First French Army Corps, under Erlon,
a matter of 20,000 men, failed to come up
in flank at the critical moment.

We have seen what the effect of that
failure was ; we have discussed its causes,
and we must repeat the main fact for

THE ACTION 161

military history of all those four days :
the breakdown of Napoleon's last des-
perate venture turned upon Erlon's useless
marching and countermarching between
Quatre Bras and Ligny, two days before
the final action of Waterloo was fought.

This being so, the battle of Waterloo
must resolve itself into two main phases :
the first, the beginning of the struggle with
Wellington before the Prussians come up ;
the second, the main and decisive part
of the action, in which both Prussians and
English are combined against the French
army.

This second phase develops continually
as the numbers of the arriving Prussians
increase, until it is clinched by the appear-
ance of Ziethen's corps at the very end
of the day, and the break-up of the French
army ; this second part is therefore itself
capable of considerable subdivision. But
in any large and general view of the
whole action, we must regard it as
divided into these two great chapters,
during the first of which is engaged the
doubtful struggle between Napoleon and
Wellington ; during the second of which the
struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined
by the arrival of the Prussians in flank upon
the field.

11

162

WATERLOO

Mpnt St. Jean
Most Northerly position
Allied Troops

•\ -

\2

/i

3 (

French position 70-4- thousand men, 246 BUI:
(')

V

^9W

Wood

ff covering
~"~*\ Prussian
'' ' advance

Scale of English miles
o J . ' 2

' t French

OVBBQI Wellington' i Army

Scale of 1000 yards f

TO Walled and defended

(iT "(i) d) (0

positions held by

Bulow's IVth Army Corps-arriving

Wellington's Army

on Hank of Napoleon in middle

in

of action. f
(t) Zieten's Ilnd Army Corps

(f) Hougoumont
(d) Le Haye SaTnte

arriving at N.E. angle at end of

action and clinching it.

ELEMENTS OF WATERLOO.

THE ACTION 163

THE FIRST PART OF THE ACTION
Before the Arrival of the Prussians

The action was to take the form of an
assault by Napoleon's forces against this
defensive position held by Wellington. It
was the business of Wellington, although his
total force was slightly inferior to the enemy
in numbers,1 and considerably inferior in
guns, to hold that defensive position until the
Prussians should come up in flank. This he
had had word would take place at latest by
one or two o'clock. It was the business of
Napoleon to capture the strong outworks,
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte ; and, that
done, to hammer the enemy's line until he
broke it. That delay in beginning this
hammering would be fatal ; that the
Prussians were present upon his flank,
could arrive in the midst of the battle, and
were both confidently and necessarily ex-
pected by his enemy ; that his simple single
battle would turn into two increasingly
complex ones, Napoleon could have no
idea. Napoleon could see no need for
haste. A long daylight was before him.
It was necessary to let the ground dry
somewhat after the terrible rain of the day
before if artillery was to be used effectively ;
1 Almost exactly ten per cent.

164 WATERLOO

nor did he press his columns, which were
moving into position all through the morn-
ing, and which had not completely deployed
even by eleven o'clock.

It was a little after that hour that he
dictated to Soult the order of battle. Its
first and effective phrases run as follows :—

" Once the whole army is deployed, that
is, at about half-past one, at the moment
when the Emperor shall send the order to
Marshal Ney, the attack is to be delivered.
It will have for its object the capture of the
village of Mont St Jean and the cross-
roads. . . ."

The remainder of the order sets out
forces to be engaged in this first attack.

The French forces consisted in the Ilnd
Army Corps deployed to the left or west of
the road, the 1st to the right or east of it,
and behind Napoleon, in the centre and in
reserve, the Vlth Corps and the Guard.

The plan in the Emperor's mind was
perfectly simple. There was to be no
turning of the right nor of the left flank of
the enemy, which would only have the
effect of throwing back that enemy east or
west. His line was to be pierced, the
village of Mont St Jean which lay on the
ridge of Wellington's position and which
overlooks the plateau on every side was

THE ACTION 165

to be carried, and this done Napoleon
would be free to decide upon his next
action, according to the nature and extent
of the disorder into which he had thrown
the enemy's broken line.

As a fact, Napoleon made a movement
before that hour of half-past one which
he had set down in his order for the begin-
ning of the assault. That movement was
a movement against the advanced and
fortified position of Hougomont.

He sent orders to his left, to the body on
the east of the high road, the Second Army
Corps, under Reille, to send troops to
occupy the outer gardens, wood, and
orchards of the country-house, and at
twenty-five minutes to twelve the first gun
fired in support of that movement was also
the first cannonshot of Waterloo.

After a brief artillery duel and exchange
of cannonshots between the height on the
French left, which overlooks Hougomont,
and the corresponding height upon the
English right, the French infantry began
to march down the slope to occupy the
little wood which stands to the south
of the chateau. These four regiments
were commanded by the Emperor's brother
Jerome, who was — as we have seen at
Quatre Bras — under the orders of Reille.

166 WATERLOO

The clearing of the wood was no very
desperate affair, but it was a difficult one,
and it took an hour. The Germans of Nassau
and Hanover, who were charged with the
defence of Hougomont and its approaches,
stubbornly contested the standing trees
and the cut-clearing which lay between
them and the garden wall of the chateau.

It must be clearly seized, at this early
and even premature point in the action,
that Napoleon's object in making this
attack upon Hougomont was only to weaken
Wellington's centre.

Hougomont lay upon Wellington's right.
Wellington had always been nervous of his
right, and feared the turning]- of his line
there, because, should he have to retreat,
his communications would ultimately lie in
that direction. It was for this reason that
he had set right off at Braine F Alleud, nearly
a mile to the west of his line, the Dutch-
Belgian Division of Chasse and sixteen guns,
which force he connected with a reserve
body at Hal, much further to the west.

Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougo-
mont before the action proper was begun,
coming thus upon Wellington's right, would
make him attempt to reinforce the place
and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor
intended the brunt of the attack to fall.

THE ACTION 167

Napoleon had no other intention that
history can discover in pressing the attack
against Hougomont so early. It was almost
in the nature of a " feint." But when, to-
wards half -past twelve, his brother's division
had cleared the wood and come up against
the high garden wall of the farm, for some
reason which cannot be determined, whether
the eagerness of the troops, the impulsive-
ness of Jerome himself, or whatever cause,
instead of being contented with holding
the wood according to orders, the French
furiously attacked the loopholed and de-
fended wall. They attempted to break
in the great door, which was recessed, and
therefore protected by a murderous cross-
fire. They were beaten back into the wood,
leaving a heap of dead. At this point
Reille, according to his own account (which
may well enough be accurate), sent orders
for the division to remain in the wood, and
not to waste itself against so strong an
outpost. But Jerome and his men were
not to be denied. They marched round
the chateau, under a heavy artillery fire
from the English batteries above, and
attempted to carry the north wall. As
they were so doing, four companies of the
Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which
Wellington could be tempted to part with

168 WATERLOO

from his main line, came in reinforcement
to the defence, and, after a sharp struggle,
the French were thrust back once more.

It was by that time past one o'clock,
and this first furious attempt upon Hougo-
mont, unintended by the Emperor, and a
sheer waste, had doubly failed. It had
failed in itself — the house and garden still
remained untaken, the post was still held.
It had failed in its object, which had been
to draw Wellington, and to get him to send
numerous troops from his centre to his right
in defence of the threatened place.

Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this
diversion of a few regiments against Hougo-
mont was but a small matter, had prepared
and was about to deliver his main attack.

The reader will see upon the contours of
the coloured map a definite spur of land
marked with a broad green band in front of
the French order of battle, and further
marked by the green letter " B " in the very
centre of the map. It was along this spur
and at about one o'clock that the Emperor
drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in
order to prepare the assault upon the
opposing ridge, which was to be delivered the
moment their fire had ceased. Napoleon at
that moment was watching his army and its
approaching engagement from that summit

THE ACTION 169

upon the great road marked " A " in
green upon my coloured map, whence the
whole landscape to the north and west lies
open.1

There he received the report of Ney that
the guns were ready, and only waiting for
the order.

A little while before the guns were ready
and Ney had reported to that effect, Napo-
leon had received Grouchy 's letter, in which
it was announced that the mass of the
Prussian army had retreated on Wavre.
He had replied to it with instructions to
Grouchy so to act that no Prussian corps
at Wavre could come and join Wellington".
Hardly had the Emperor dictated this reply
when, looking northward and then eastward
over the great view, he saw, somewhat over
four miles away, a shadow, or a movement,
or a stain upon the bare uplands towards
Wavre ; he thought that appearance to be
companies of men. A few moments later
a sergeant of Silesian Hussars, taken
prisoner by certain cavalry detachments
far out to the east, was brought in. He

1 It is from thirty to fifty feet above the spur on
which he had just ranged his guns in front of the army,
some twenty-five feet higher than the crest occupied
a mile off by the allied army, and a few feet higher
than the bare land somewhat more than four miles off,
upon which Napoleon first discerned the arriving
Prussians.

170 WATERLOO

had upon him a letter sent from Bulow to
Wellington announcing that the Prussians
were at hand, and the prisoner further told
the Emperor that the troops just perceived
were the vanguard of the Prussian rein-
forcement. Thus informed, the Emperor
caused a postscript to be added to his
dictated letter, and bade Grouchy march
at once towards this Prussian column, fall
upon it while it was still upon the march
and defenceless and destroy it.

Such an order presupposed Grouchy's
ability to act upon it ; Napoleon took that
ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact,
could not act upon it in time. Hard riding
could not get Napoleon's note to Grouchy's
quarters within much less than an hour and
a half. When it got there Grouchy himself
must be found, and that done his 33,000
must be got together in order to take the
new direction. Further, the Emperor could
not know in what state Grouchy's forces
might be, nor what direction they might al-
ready have taken. It should be mentioned,
however, to explain Napoleon's evident
hope at the moment of things going well,
that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was
commonly believed in the Prussian lines that
Grouchy was actually marching to join him,
Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent

THE ACTION 171

some cavalry off eastward to watch the
advent of the Prussians; he ordered his
remnant of one army corps, the Sixth,
which he had kept in reserve behind his
line,1 to march down the hill to the village
of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the
Prussian attack ; and having done all this,
he made ready for the assault upon the
ridge which Wellington's troops held.

That assault was to be preceded, as I have
said, by artillery preparation from the great
battery of eighty guns which lay along the
spur to the north and in front of the French
line. For half an hour those guns filled
the shallow valley with their smoke ; at
half - past one they ceased, and Erlon's
First Corps d'Armee, fresh to the combat,
because it had so unfortunately missed both
Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend
from its position, to cross the bottom, and
to climb the opposite slope, while over the
heads of the assaulting columns the French
and English cannon answered each other
from height to height.

The advance across the valley, as will be
apparent from the map, had upon its right
the village of Papelotte, upon its left the
farm of La Haye Sainte, and for its objective
that highway which runs along the top
1 See map opposite title-page.

172 WATERLOO

of the ridge, and of which the most part
was in those days a sunken road, as effective
for defence as a regular trench.

Following a practice which he never
abandoned, which he had found universally
successful, and upon which he ever relied,
the Duke of Wellington had kept his
British troops, the nucleus of his defensive
plan, for the last and worst of the action.
He had stationed to take the first brunt
those troops upon which he least relied, and
these were the first Dutch-Belgian brigade
under Bijlandt. This body was stationed
in front of the sunken road (at the point
marked A in red upon the map). Behind
it he had put Pack's brigade and Kemp's,
both British ; to the left of it, but also
behind the road, Best's Hanoverian brigade.
Papelotte village he held with Perponcher's
Belgians.

It will be seen that the crushing fire of
the French eighty guns maintained for half
an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-
Belgians, standing exposed upon the forward
slope at a range of not more than 800 yards.1
At the French charge, though that was
delivered through high standing crops and

1 There is conflict of evidence as to how long the
brigade was exposed to this terrible ordeal. It was
slightly withdrawn at some moment, but what moment
is doubtful.

over d

THE ACTION 173

over drenched and slippery soil up the slope,
Bijlandt's brigade broke. It is doubtful
indeed whether any other troops would not
have broken under such circumstances.
Unfortunately the incident has been made
the subject of repeated and most ungenerous
accusation. A body purposely set forward
before the whole line to stand such fearful
pounding and to shelter the rest ; one,
moreover, which in two days of fighting
certainly lost one-fourth of its number in
killed and wounded, and probably lost more
than one-third, is deserving of a much more
chivalrous judgment than that shown by
most historians in its regard. Anyhow,
Kemp's brigade quickly filled the gap left
by the failure of the Netherlanders, and
began to press back the French charge.

Meanwhile the French right, which had
captured Papelotte, was compelled to retreat
upon seeing the centre thus driven back,
while the French left had failed to carry the
farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this
side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the
great road, the check and reverse to the
French assault had been more complete
than elsewhere. An attempt to drive its
first success home with a cavalry charge
had been met by a countercharge, deservedly
famous, in which, among other regiments,

174 WATERLOO

the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues,
the King's Dragoons, had broken the French
horse and followed up the French retire-
ment down the slope. The centre of that
retirement was similarly charged by the
Scots Greys ; and in the end of the whole
affair the English horsemen rode up to the
spur where the great battery stood, sabred
the gunners, and then, being thus advanced
so uselessly and so dangerously from their
line, were in their turn driven back to the
English positions with bad loss.

When this opening chapter of the battle
closed, the net result was that the initial
charge of the First Corps under Erlon had
failed. It had left behind it many prisoners ;
certain guns which had advanced with it
had been put out of action ; it had lost two
colours.

Save for the furious inconsequent and
almost purposeless fighting that was still
raging far off to the left round Hougomont,
the battle ceased. The valley between the
opposing forces was strewn with the dead
and dying, but no formed groups stood or
moved among the fallen men. The swept
slopes had all the appearance during that
strange halt of a field already lost or won.
The hour was between three and half-past
in the afternoon, and so ended the first

THE ACTION 175

phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had
lasted rather over two hours.

THE SECOND PART OF THE ACTION

The second and decisive phase of the
battle of Waterloo differed from the first
in this : In the first phase Napoleon was
attacking Wellington's command alone. It
was line against line. By hammering at the
line opposed to him on the ridge of the
Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently ex-
pected to break it before the day should
close. His first hammer blow, which was
the charge of the First Army Corps under
Erlon, had failed, and failed badly. The
cavalry in support of that infantry charge
had failed as well as their comrades, and
the British in their turn had charged the
retiring French, got right into their line,
sabred their gunners, only to be broken in
their turn by the counter-effort of further
French horse.

This first phase had ended in a sort of halt
or faint in the battle, as I have described.

The second phase was a very different
matter. It developed into what were
essentially two battles. It found Napoleon
fighting not only against Wellington in
front of him, but against Blucher to his

176 WATERLOO

right and almost behind him. It was no
longer a simple business of hammering with
the whole force of the French army at the
British and their allies upon the ridge in
front, but of desperately attempting to
break the Anglo-Dutch line against time,
with diminishing and perpetually reduced
forces ; with forces perpetually reduced by
the necessity of sending more and more men
off to the right to resist, if it were possible,
the increasing pressure of the accumulating
Prussian forces upon the right flank of the
French.

This second phase of the action at
Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of
four o'clock.

It is true that the arriving Prussians
had not yet debouched from the screen of
wood that hid them two and a half miles
away to the east, but at that hour (four
o'clock) the heads of their columns were all
ready to debouch, and the delay between
their actual appearance upon the field
and the beginning of the second half of the
battle was not material to the result.

That second half of the action began with
a series of great cavalry charges which the
Emperor had not designed, and which, even
as he watched them, he believed would be
fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous

.

THE ACTION 177

rides presented the most awful and memor-
able pageant in the history of modern war; as
tactics they were erroneous, and grievously
erroneous.

Before this second phase of the battle
was entered it was easily open to Napoleon,
recognising the Prussians advancing and
catching no sight of Grouchy, to change his
plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand
upon the defensive along the height which
he commanded, there to await Grouchy,
and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain
the chances of an issue which might at
least be negative, if he could prevent its
being decisively disastrous.

But even if such a conception had passed
through the Emperor's mind, military
science was against it. If ever those
opposed to him had full time to concentrate
their forces he would, even with the rein-
forcement of Grouchy, be fighting very
nearly two to one. His obvious, one might
say his necessary, plan was to break
Wellington's line, if still it could be broken,
before the full pressure of the arriving
Prussians should be felt. Short of that,
there could be nothing but immediate or
ultimate disaster.

We shall see how, much later in the action,
yet another opportunity for breaking away,

12

178 WATERLOO

and for standing upon the defensive, or
for retreating, was, in the opinion of some
critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.

But we shall see how, upon that second
and later occasion in the day, his advantage
in so doing was even less than it was now
between this hour of half-past three and
four o'clock, when he determined to renew
the combat.

He first sent orders to Ney to make
certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear the
enemy from that stronghold, which checked
a direct assault upon the centre, and then
to renew the general attack.

La Haye Sainte was not taken at this
first attempt. The French were repelled ;
the skirmishers, who were helping the
direct attack by mounting the slope upon
its right, were thrown back as well, and
after this unsuccessful beginning of the
movement the guns were called upon to
prepare a further and more vigorous assault
upon a larger scale. Not only the first
great battery of eighty guns, but many of
the batteries to the west of the Brussels
road (which had hitherto been turned upon
Hougomont and the English guns behind
that position) were now directed upon the
centre of the English line, and there broke
out a cannonade even more furious than the

THE ACTION 179

one which had opened the action at one
o'clock. Men trained in a generation's
experience of war called it the most furious
artillery effort of their time ; and never,
perhaps, even in the career of the Gunner
who was now in the last extremity of his
fate, had guns better served him.

Under the battering of that discharge
the front of Wellington's command was
partially withdrawn behind the cover of the
ridge. A stream of wounded, mixed with
not a few men broken and flying, began to
swell northward up the Brussels road ;
and Ney, imagining from such a sight that
the enemy's line wavered, committed his
capital error, and called upon the cavalry to
charge.

Wellington's line was not wavering. For
the mass of the French cavalry to charge at
such a moment was to waste irreparably
a form of energy whose high potential
upon the battlefield corresponds to a very
rapid exhaustion, and which, invaluable
against a front shaken and doubtful, is
useless against a front still solid.

It was not and could not have been the
Emperor who ordered that false step. It is
even uncertain whether the whole body of
horsemen that moved had been summoned
by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not

180 WATERLOO

simply follow the advance of their fellows.
At any rate, the great group of mounted
men l which lay in reserve behind the First
Army Corps, and to the west of the road,
passed in its entirety through the infantry,
and began to advance at the trot down the
valley for the assault upon the opposite slope.

I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney
called upon all this mass of cavalry and
deliberately risked the waste of it in one
blow. It is more probable that there was
some misunderstanding ; that Desnoettes'
command, which was drawn up behind
Milhaud's, followed Milhaud's, under the
impression that a general order had been
given to both ; that Ney, seeing this extra
body of horse following, imagined Napoleon
to have given it orders. At any rate,
Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from
the height upon which he stood, could not
have seen the first execution of them, for
the first advance of that cavalry was
hidden from him by a slight lift of land.

There were 5000 mounted men drawn up
in the hollow to the west of the Brussels
road for the charge. It was not until they
began to climb the slope that Napoleon

1 The group marked "C" upon the coloured map.
It was for the most part under the command of Mil-
haud, but the rear of it was under the command of
Desnoettes.

THE ACTION 181

saw what numbers were being risked, and
perceived the full gravity of Ney's error.

To charge unshaken infantry in this
fashion, and to charge it without immediate
infantry support, was a thing which that
master of war would never have commanded,
and which, when he saw it developing
under the command of his lieutenant, filled
him with a sense of peril. But it was too
late to hesitate or to change the disposition
of this sudden move. The 5000 climbed
at a slow and difficult trot through the
standing crops and the thick mud of the
rising ground, suffered — with a moment's
wavering — the last discharge of the British
guns, and then, on reaching the edge of the
plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.

It was futile. They passed the line of
guns (the gunners had orders to abandon
their pieces and to retire within the infantry
squares) ; they developed, in too short a
start, too slight an impetus ; they seethed,
as the famous metaphor of that field goes,
" like angry waves round rocks " ; they
lashed against every side of the squares
into which the allied infantry had formed.
The squares stood.

Wellington had had but a poor opinion
of his command. It contained, indeed,
elements more diverse and raw material

182 WATERLOO

in larger proportion than ever he, or perhaps
any other general of the great wars, had
had to deal with, but it was infantry
hitherto unshaken ; and the whole concep-
tion of that false movement, the whole error
of that cavalry action, lay in the idea that the
allied line had suffered in a fashion which
it had been very far from suffering. Noth-
ing was done against the squares ; and the
firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole
resistance, were the squares of British
infantry, three deep, against which the
furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing
of sword with bayonet proved utterly
vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving
tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands
of foot resisting their every effort, Uxbridge,
gathering all his cavalry, charged, and
5000 fresh horse fell upon the French
lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded
and lessened by grape at fifty yards and
musket fire at ten. This countercharge
of Uxbridge's cleared the plateau. The
French horsemen turned bridle, fled to
the hollow of the valley again, and the
English gunners returned to their pieces.
The whole fury of the thing had failed.

But it had failed only for a moment.
What remained of the French horse re-
formed and once again attempted to charge.

THE ACTION 183

Once again, for all their gravely diminished
numbers, they climbed the slope ; once
again the squares were formed, and the
torment of horsemen round about them
struck once more.

Seen from the point where Napoleon
stood to the rear of his line, the high place
that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed
to eyes of less genius than his own that this
second attempt had succeeded. Indeed,
its fierce audacity seemed to other than the
French observers at that distance to
promise success. The drivers of the re-
serve batteries in the rear of Wellington's
line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon,
reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing
one chance at last of victory by mere shock,
himself sent forward a reserve of horse to
support the distant cuirassiers and lancers.
He called upon Kellerman, commanding
the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the
charge.

He knew how doubtful was the success
of this last reinforcement, for he knew how
ill-judged had been Ney's first launching
of that great mass of horse at an unbroken
enemy ; but, now that the thing was done,
lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic
which might gain the whole army, he risked
almost the last mounted troops he had

184 WATERLOO

and sent them forward, acting thus like a
man throwing good money after bad for
fear that all may be lost.

A better reason still decided Napoleon
so to risk a very desperate chance, and to
hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud.
That reason was the advent, now accom-
plished, of the Prussians upon his right,
and the necessity, imperative and agonised,
of breaking Wellington's line before the
whole strength of the newcomers should
be felt upon the French flank and rear.

Let us turn, then, and see how far and
with what rapidity the Prussians at this
moment — nearly half-past five o'clock —
had accomplished their purpose.

Of the four Prussian corps d'armee
bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and
unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy,
it was the fourth, that of Bulow, which
was given the task of marching first upon
the Sunday morning to effect the junction
with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the fur-
thest to the east of all the Prussian army,1
but it was fresh to the fight, for it had come
up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was
complete ; it was well commanded.
1 See sketch opposite page 134.

THE ACTION 185

The road it had to traverse was not only
long, but difficult. The passage of the
river Lasne had to be effected across so
steep a ravine and by so impassable a
set of ways that the modern observer,
following that march as the present writer
has followed it, after rain and over those
same fields and roads, is led to marvel that
it was done in the time which Blucher's
energy and the traditional discipline of the
Prussian soldiers found possible. At any
rate, the heads of the columns were on the
Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont 1
(or Paris) before four o'clock, and ready to
debouch. Wellington had expected them
upon the field by two o'clock at latest.
They disappointed him by two hours, and
nearly three, but the miracle is that they
arrived when they did ; and it is well here
to consider in detail this feat which the
Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accom-
plished, for it is a matter upon which
our historians of Waterloo are often silent,
and which has been most unfortunately
neglected in this country.

The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under
Bulow, lay as far east as Liege when, on the
14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to

1 This is the wood upon the extreme right hand of
the coloured map.

186 WATERLOO

cross the Sambre. Its various units were
all in the close neighbourhood of the town,
so none of them were spared much of the
considerable march which all were about
to undertake to the west ; even its most
westward detachment was no more than
three miles from Liege city.

Bulow should have received the order
to march westward at half-past ten on the
morning of the 15th. The order, as we have
seen in speaking of Ligny, was not delivered
till the evening of that day. The Fourth
Army Corps was told to concentrate in the
neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of
that distant point. The corps, as a whole,
did not arrive until the early afternoon
of Friday the 16th.

It is from this point — Hannut — that the
great effort begins.

Bulow, it must be remembered, com-
manded no less than 32,000 men. The
fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the
progress of such a body, most of it tied to
one road, will easily be appreciated.

During the afternoon of the 16th, while
Ligny was being fought, he advanced the
whole of this body to points immediately
north and east of Gembloux. Not a man,
therefore, of his great command had
marched less than twenty miles, many must

THE ACTION 187

have marched over twenty-five, upon that
Friday afternoon.

Then followed the night during which
the other three defeated corps fell back
upon Wavre.

That night was full of their confused but
unmolested retreat. With the early morn-
ing of the Saturday Bulow's 32,000 fell back
along a line parallel to the general retire-
ment, and all that day they were making
their way by the cross-country route
through Welhain and Corroy to Dion
Le Mont.

This task was accomplished through
pouring rain, by uiipaved lanes and through
intolerable mud, over a distance of close on
seventeen miles for the hardest pushed of
the troops, and not less than thirteen for
those whom the accident of position had
most spared.

The greater part of the Fourth Corps had
spent the first night in the open ; all of it
had spent the second night upon the
drenched ground. Upon the third day, the
Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it
lies furthest from the field of Waterloo of
all the Prussian forces, is picked out to
march first to the aid of Wellington, because
it as yet has had no fighting and is supposed
to be " fresh." On the daybreak, therefore,

188 WATERLOO

after bivouacking in that dreadful weather,
Bulow's force is again upon the move. It
does not get through Wavre until something
like eight o'clock, and the abominable
conditions of the march may be guessed
from the fact that its centre did not reach
St Lambert until one o'clock, nor did the
last brigade pass through that spot until
three o'clock. Down the steep ravine of
the Lasne and up on the westward side of it
was so hard a business that, as we have seen,
the brigades did not begin to debouch from
the woods at the summit until after four
o'clock. It was not until after five o'clock
that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up
in line with the rest upon the field of Water-
loo, having moved, under such abominable
conditions of slow, drenched marching,
another fifteen miles.

In about forty-eight hours, therefore,
this magnificent piece of work had been
accomplished. It was a total movement
of over fifty miles for the average of the
corps — certainly more than sixty for those
'who had marched furthest — broken only
by two short nights, and those nights spent
in the open, one under drenching rain.
The whole thing was accomplished without
appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage,
and at the end of it these men put up a

THE ACTION 189

fight which was the chief factor in deciding
Waterloo.

Such was the supreme effort of the
Fourth Prussian Army Corps which decided
Waterloo.

There are not many examples of endur-
ance so tenacious and organisation so
excellent in the moving so large a body
under such conditions in the whole history
of war.

When the Fourth Prussian Corps de-
bouched from the Wood of Fischermont
and began its two-mile approach towards
his flank, Napoleon, who had already had
it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered
Lobau with the Sixth French Army Corps,
or rather with what he had kept with him
of the Sixth Army Corps, to go forward and
check it.

It could only be a question of delay.
Lobau had but 10,000 against the 30,000
which Bulow could ultimately bring against
him when all his brigades had come up ;
but delay was the essential of the moment
to Napoleon. To ward off the advancing
Prussian pressure just so long as would
permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was
his most desperate need. Lobau met the

190 WATERLOO

enemy, three to two, in the hollow of
Plancenoit,1 was turned by such superior
numbers, and driven from the village.

All this while, during the Prussian success
which brought that enemy's reinforcement
nearer and nearer to the rear of the French
army and to the Emperor's own standpoint,
the wasted though magnificent action of the
French cavalry was continuing against
Wellington's right centre, west of the
Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for
the third time ; the plateau was occupied,
the British guns abandoned, the squares
formed. For the third time that furious
seething of horse against foot was seen from
the distant height of the Belle Alliance.
For the third time the sight carried with
it a deceptive appearance of victory. For
the third time the cavalry charge broke
back again, spent, into the valley below.
Ney , wild as he had been wild at Quatre Bras,
failing in judgment as he had failed then,
shouted for the last reserve of horse, and
forgot to call for that 6000 untouched
infantry, the bulk of Reille's Second Corps,
which watched from the height of the
French ridge the futile efforts of their
mounted comrades.

1 In the model on p. 155 Plancenoit is not shown.
It would be out of the model, nearer the spectator,
behind Napoleon's position at A, and between A and N.

THE ACTION 191

Folly as it was to have charged unbroken
infantry with horse alone, the charges had
been so repeated and so tenacious that,
immediately supported by infantry, they
might have succeeded. If those 6000 men
of Reille's, the mass of the Second Army
Corps, which stood to arms unused upon the
ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had
been ordered to follow hard upon the last
cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have
snatched victory from such a desperate
double strain as no general yet in military
history has escaped. He might conceivably
have broken Wellington's line before that
gathering flood of Prussians to the right and
behind him should have completed his
destruction.

But the moment was missed. E/eille's
infantry was not ordered forward until the
defending line had had ample time to pre-
pare its defence ; until the English gunners
were back again at their pieces, and the
English squares once more deployed and
holding the whole line of their height.

It is easy to note such errors as we
measure hours and distances upon a map.
It is a wonderment to some that such
capital errors appear at all in the history of
armies. Those who have experience of
active service will tell us what the intoxica-

192 WATERLOO

tion of the cavalry charges meant, of what
blood Ney's brain was full, and why that
order for the infantry came too late. Of
the 6000 infantry which attempted so
belated a charge, a quarter was broken
before the British line was reached, and
that assault, in its turn, failed.

At this point in the battle, somewhat
after six o'clock, two successes on the part
of the French gave them an opportunity for
their last disastrous effort, and introduced
the close of the tragedy.

The first was the capture of La Haye
Sainte, the second was the recapture of
Plancenoit.

La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken
before the very front of Wellington's line,
must be captured if yet a further effort was
to be attempted by Napoleon. Major
Baring had held it with his small body of
Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust
back a general assault, and throughout more
than five hours he had resisted partial and
equally unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney,
ordered to carry it at whatever cost, brought
up against it a division, and more than a
division. The French climbed upon their
heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the
walls, and, at the end of the butchery,
Baring with forty-two men — all that was

THE ACTION 193

left him out of nine companies — cut his
way back through to the main line, and the
farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left,
round which so meaningless a struggle had
raged all day long, was never wholly cleared
of its defenders, but the main body of it
was in flames, and with the capture of La
Haye Sainte the whole front was free for
a final attack at the moment which Napo-
leon should decide.

Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French
reinforcements had recaptured the village
and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had
given way before the Prussian advance, as
we have seen. The next French reinforce-
ments, though they had at first thrust the
Prussians back, in turn gave way as the
last units of the enemy arrived, and the
Prussian batteries were dropping shot right
on to the fields which bordered the Brussels
road.

Napoleon took eleven battalions of the
Guard (the Imperial Guard was his reserve,
and had not yet come into action1) and
drew them up upon his flank to defend
the Brussels road ; with two more battal-
ions he reinforced the wavering troops in

1 The Guard as a whole had lain behind the French
line in reserve all day upon the point marked D upon
the coloured map.

13

194 WATERLOO

Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy out
of the village with the bayonet, and for the
moment checked that pressure upon the
flank and rear which could not but ulti-
mately return.

It was somewhat past seven by the time
all this was accomplished. Napoleon sur-
veyed a field over which it was still just
possible (in his judgment at least) to
strike a blow that might save him. He
saw, far upon the left, Hougomont in flames ;
in the centre, La Haye Sainte captured ;
on the right, the skirmishers advancing
upon the slope before the English line ;
his eastern flank for the moment free of the
Prussians, who had retired before the sudden
charge of the Guard. He heard far off a
cannonade which might be that of Grouchy.

But even as he looked upon his oppor-
tunity he saw one further thing that goaded
him to an immediate hazard. Upon the
north-eastern corner of his strained and
bent-back line of battle, against the far,
perilous, exposed angle of it, he saw new,
quite unexpected hordes of men advancing.
It was Ziethen debouching with the head
of his First Prussian Army Corps at this
latest hour — and Napoleon saw those most
distant of his troops ready to yield to the
new torrent.

THE ACTION 195

The sun, now within an hour of setting,
had shone out again. Its light came level
down the shallow valley, but all that hollow
was so filled with the smoke of recent dis-
charges that the last stroke which Napoleon
was now preparing was in part hidden from
the Allies upon the hill. That final stake,
the only venture left, was to be use of his
last reserve and the charge of the Guard.

No combat in history, perhaps, had seen
a situation so desperate maintained without
the order for retreat. Wellington's front,
which the French were attacking, was still
held unbroken ; upon the French flank and
rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army
Corps were for the moment held, they must
inevitably return ; more remained to come :
they were in the act of pressing upon the
only line open to the French for retreat,
and now here came Ziethen with his new
masses upon the top of all.

If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that
fatal day, retreat had been possible or
advisable to Napoleon, every rule of mili-
tary art demanded it. He was now quite
outnumbered ; his exhausted troops were
strained up to and beyond the breaking
point. To carry such strains too far means
in all things, not only in war, an irretriev-
able catastrophe.

196 WATERLOO

But retreat was hardly possible as a
military action ; it was impossible as a
political one.

Napoleon could hardly retreat at that
hour, although he was already defeated,
because the fury and the exhaustion of the
combat, its increasing confusion, and the
increasing dispersion of its units, made any
rapid concentration and organisation for the
purposes of a sudden retirement hazardous
in the extreme. The doomed body, held
closer and closer upon its right flank,
menaced more and more on its right rear,
now suddenly threatened on its exposed
salient angle, would fight on.

Though Napoleon had withdrawn from
the combat an hour before, when Billow's
30,000 had struck at his right flank and
made his destruction certain ; though he
had then, while yet he could, organised a
retirement, abandoned the furious struggle
for La Haye Sainte before it was successful,
and covered with his best troops an immedi-
ate retreat, that retreat would not have
availed his cause.

The appearance of the Prussians on his
right proved glaringly the nature of his
doom. Grouchy — a quarter of his forces
— was cut off from him altogether. The
enemy, whom he believed to be beyond

THE ACTION 197

Grouchy, and pursued by Grouchy, had
appeared, upon the contrary, between
Grouchy and himself. Now Ziethen too was
here.

Did Napoleon retire, he would retire
before forces half as large again as his own,
and destined to grow to double his own
within a few hours. His retirement would
leave Grouchy to certain disaster.

Politically, retreat was still more hopeless.
He himself would re-enter France defeated,
with, at the most, half the strength that
had crossed the frontier three days before.
He would so re-enter France — the wealthier
classes of which watched his power, nearly
all of them with jealousy, most with active
hate — surrounded by general officers not
ten of whom, perhaps, he could sincerely
trust, and by a whole society which sup-
ported him only upon the doubtful condition
of victory.

Such a retirement was ruin. It was more
impossible morally even than it was im-
possible physically, under the conditions of
the field. Therefore it was that, under con-
ditions so desperate, with his battle lost if
ever battle was, the Emperor yet attempted
one ultimate throw, and in this half-hour
before the sunset sent forward the Guard.

In those solemn moments, wherein the

198 WATERLOO

Imperial Guard formed for their descent
into that hollow whose further slope was
to see their last feat of arms, Ziethen, with
the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the
far corner the field of battle. At the far end
of the long ridge of the Mont St Jean, more
than a mile away, this last great body and
newest reinforcement of the Emperor's foes
had emerged from the walls and thickets of
Smohain and, new to the fighting, was
already pushing in the weary French line
that had stood the carnage of six hours.
It was not enough that the Fourth Prussian
Corps should have determined the day
already with its 30,000 come up from the
east against him ; now the foremost
battalions of the First coming up from the
north were appearing to clinch the matter
altogether.

It was under such conditions of irretriev-
able disaster that Napoleon played for
miracle, and himself riding slowly down the
valley at the head of his comrades and
veterans, gave them over to Ney for the
final attack against Wellington's line which
still held the opposing slope.

It was then, at the moment when Ziethen
and the men of the First Prussian Army
Corps began to press upon the north-
eastern angle of the fight, and were ready

THE ACTION 199

to determine it altogether, that the Guard
began its ponderous thrust up between
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the
west of the Brussels road. Up that fatal
hill, which had seen the four great cavalry
charges, and more recently the breaking of
the Second Corps, the tall men, taller for
the bearskins and the shouldered musket,
the inheritors of twenty -two victorious and
now immortal years, leant forward, advanc-
ing. To the hanging smoke of the cannon
in the vale was added the rising mist of
evening ; and when the furious cannonade
which was to support their attack had
ceased with their approach to the enemy's
line, a sort of silence fell upon the spectators
of that great event.

The event was brief.

It was preceded by a strange sight : a
single horseman galloped unharmed from
the French to the English line (a captain) ;
he announced to the enemy the approaching
movement of the Guard. He was a hater
of the flag and of the Revolution, and of
its soldier : he was for the old Kings.

There was no need for this dramatic aid.
The lull in the action, Napoleon's necessity
for a last stroke, possibly through the mist
and smoke the actual movement of the
Guard, were apparent. The infantry whom

200 WATERLOO

Wellington had retired behind the ridge
during the worst of the artillery preparation
was now set forward again. It was the
strongest and the most trusted of his troops
whom Wellington posted to receive the
shock — Adams' brigade and the brigade of
Guards. Three batteries of the reserve
were brought forward, with orders not to
reply to the French cannon, but to fire at
the advancing columns of the charge.

As the Guard went upward, the whole
French front to the right moved forward
and supported the attack. But upon the
left, the Second Army Corps, Reille's
recently broken 6000, could not yet move.
They came far behind and to the west of
the Brussels road ; the Guard went up the
slope alone.

At two hundred yards from the English
line the grape began to mow through them.
They closed up after each discharge. Their
advance continued unchecked.

Of the four columns,1 that nearest to the
Brussels road reached, touched, and broke
the line of the defenders. Its strength
was one battalion, yet it took the two
English batteries, and, in charging Halkett's
brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into

1 Virtually, this advance in echelon had turned into
four columns.

THE ACTION 201

confusion. It might have been imagined
for one moment that the line had here been
pierced, but this first and greatest chance
of success was defeated, and with it all
chances, for it is the head of a charge that
tells.

The reader will have seen upon the map,
far off to the west or left, at Braine FAlleud,
a body of reserve, Belgian, which Welling-
ton had put so far off in the mistaken notion
that the French would try to turn him in
that direction. This force of 3000 men
with sixteen guns Wellington had recalled
in the last phases of the battle. It was
their action, and especially that of their
artillery, that broke this first success of the
Guard. The Netherlander s charged with
the bayonet to drive home the effect of their
cannon, and the westernmost column of the
French attack was ruined.

As the four columns were not all abreast,
but the head of the first a little more forward
than that of the second, the head of the
second than that of the third, and so forth,
the shock of the French guard upon the
British came in four separate blows, each
delivered a few moments later than the last.

We have seen how the Dutch broke the
first column.

The second column, which attacked the

202 WATERLOO

right of Halkett's brigade, failed also.
The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but
recovered, and their recovery was largely
due to the personal courage of their chief.

The next column, again, the third, came
upon the British Guards ; and the Guards,
reserving their fire until the enemy were at
a stone' s-throw, fired point-blank and threw
the French into confusion. During that
confusion the brigade of Guards charged,
pursued the enemy part of the way down the
slope, were closed upon by the enemy and
driven back again to the ridge.

The fourth column of the French was
now all but striking the extremity of the
British line. Here Adams' brigade, a
battalion of the 95th, the 71st, and the
52nd regiments, awaited the blow.

The 52nd was the inmost of the three.

It stood just where the confusion of the
Guards as they were thrown back up the
hill joined the still unbroken ranks of
Adams' extremity of the British line.

The 52nd determined the crisis of that
day. And it was then precisely that the
battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to
be more accurate, this was the moment
when the inevitable breaking-point ap-
peared.

Colborne was its commander. Instead

of wa:

THE ACTION 203

of waiting in the line, he determined to
run the very grave risk of leaving it upon
his own initiative, and of playing a tre-
mendous hazard; he took it upon himself
to bring the 52nd out, forward in advance
of and perpendicular to the defending line,
and so to bring a flank fire upon the last
French charge.

The peril was very great indeed. It left
a gap in the English line ; the possibility,
even the chance, of a French advance to
the left against that gap and behind the
52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of
thing which, when men do it and fail, is
quite the end of them. Colborne did it
and succeeded. No French effort was made
to the left of the 52nd. It had therefore

204 WATERLOO

but its front to consider ; it wheeled round,
left that dangerous gap in the English line,
and poured its fire in flank upon the last
charge of the fourth French column. That
fire was successful. The assault halted,
wavered, and began to break.

The French line to the right, advancing
in support of the efforts of the Guard, saw
that backward movement, and even as they
saw it there came the news of Ziethen's
unchecked and overwhelming pressure
upon the north-east of the field, a pressure
which there also had at last broken the
French formation.

The two things were so nearly simulta-
neous that no historical search or argument
will now determine the right of either to
priority. As the French west of the Brus-
sels road gave way, the whole English line
moved together and began to advance.
As the remnants of the First French Army
Corps to the east of the Brussels road were
struck by Ziethen they also broke. At which
point the first flexion occurred will never
be determined.

The host of Napoleon, stretched to the
last limit, and beyond, snapped with the
more violence, and in those last moments of
daylight a complete confusion seized upon all
but two of its numerous and scattered units.

THE ACTION 205

Those two were, first, certain remnants
of the Guard itself, and secondly, Lobau's
troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern
flank.

Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm
but isolated in the flood of the panic,
checked the pursuit only as islands check a
torrent. The pursuit still held. All the
world knows the story of the challenge
shouted to these veterans, and of Cam-
bronne's disputed reply just before the
musket ball broke his face and he fell
for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held
his troops together. But the flood of the
Prussian advance, perpetually increasing,
carried Plancenoit ; the rear ranks of the
Sixth Army Corps, thrust into the great
river of fugitives that was now pouring
southward in panic down the Brussels
road, were swept away by it and were
lost ; and at last, as darkness fell, the first
ranks also were mixed into the mass of
panic, and the Imperial army had ceased
to exist.

There was a moon that night ; and hour
after hour the Prussian cavalry, to whom
the task had been entrusted, followed,
sabring, pressing, urging the rout. Mile
after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras
itself, where the corpses, stripped by the

206 WATERLOO

peasantry, still lay stark after those two
days, the rush of the breakdown ran.
Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers
before fear had given way to fatigue with
the pursued; and when the remnants of
Napoleon's army were past the Sambre
again, not 30,000 disjointed, unorganised,
dispersed, and broken men had survived
the disaster.1

1 We may allow certainly 7000 prisoners and 30,000
killed and wounded, but that is a minimum. It is
quite possible that another 3000 should be added to the
prisoners and other 5000 to those who fell. The esti-
mates differ so widely because the numerous desertions
after the fall of the Empire make it very difficult to
compare the remnant of the army with its original
strength.

FINIS

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